When emerging market firms disclose relationship-based transactions, they face a tradeoff in which greater transparency may help lower their cost of capital at the cost of revealing proprietary information. We find that firms overcome this challenge by relying on analysts within their private...

We examine how hometown, school, and workplace social ties between financial analysts and mutual fund managers affect their business decisions. We show that a fund manager is more likely to hold stocks covered by analysts with whom she is socially connected and that she also makes higher profits...

Regulators and the investment community have been concerned that institutional investors pressure financial analysts through trading commission fees to issue optimistic opinions in support of their stock positions. We use a unique dataset that identifies mutual fund companies' allocation of...

We study whether sell-side financial analysts' physical attractiveness is associated with their job performance. We find that attractive analysts make more accurate earnings forecasts than less attractive analysts. Moreover, more attractive analysts make stock recommendations that are more...

While a large literature has examined analysts’ earnings forecasts or stock recommendations in isolation, there is little research on the effectiveness with which analysts translate their earnings forecasts into recommendations (referred to as translational effectiveness). This study provides...