In this paper, we study whether firm intangible information affects analyst behavior. We find direct evidence that when analysts make more judgment-intensive decisions, such as issuing stock recommendations, they overweight intangible information, leading to overreaction to intangible...

Hong and Kacperczyk (2010) document that decreases in analyst competition due to broker mergers encourage analysts to please managers, leading to greater consensus optimism bias. We propose three additional effects of analyst competition. The analyst effort hypothesis suggests that weaker...