This study examines whether disruptive life events affect how analysts assess risk. We exploit the staggered arrival of hurricanes between 1996 and 2009 at analysts' office locations across the United States as a plausibly exogenous shock in the analysts' experience of disruptive life events. We...

We construct a measure of analyst-level distraction based on analysts' exposure to exogenous attention-grabbing events affecting firms under coverage. We find that temporarily distracted analysts achieve lower forecast accuracy, revise forecasts less frequently, and publish less informative...