This paper shows that the empirical distribution of cross-sectional analyst coverage in China’s stock market maintains an exponential pattern for each year and each month from 2011 to 2020. Moreover, the parameter λ of coverage distribution is directly related to market risk premium....

We investigate the role of financial advice in shaping the composition of household portfolios in Great Britain. Advice is associated with a reallocation of wealth away from real estate and towards bonds and stocks, especially when households seek financial advice "for investments". Having a...

We adopt an information risk view and hypothesize that low quality financial disclosure related to equity pledging by controlling shareholders impairs analyst forecast quality. We sample Chinese A-share firms and find that the proportion of shares pledged (pledge ratio) by controlling...

We use a unique dataset from a large retail bank to examine the impact of financial advice on personal retirement savings. We document that retirement-related financial advice is associated with an increase in tax-exempt retirement accounts and equity investments, both at the extensive as well...

We uncover a negative correlation between macroeconomic uncertainty and security analyst earning forecasts dispersion, and explain it through herding behavior bias of the analysts. We find that the herding firms, whose analysts suffer the herding bias, have greater firm-level uncertainty than...

This paper examines that analyst network reputation shapes information efficiency in the stock market. Using a analyst-firm pair dataset from the Chinese Stock Exchange from 2011 to 2021, analyst network reputation is constructed by multi-attribute decision making and synthetic evaluation...

We arranged for trained undercover men and women to pose as potential clients and visit all 65 local financial advisory firms in Hong Kong, China. At financial planning firms, but not at securities firms, women were more likely than men to receive advice to buy only individual or only local...

We show that the recently released text-based artificial intelligence tool GPT-4 can provide suitable financial advice. The tool suggests specific investment portfolios that reflect an investor's individual circumstances such as risk tolerance, risk capacity, and sustainability preference....

We examine the impact of managerial sentiment on analysts' following decisions and earnings forecast accuracy. By analyzing the textual tone of management discussion and analysis sections in annual reports to capture managerial sentiment, we find that when managerial sentiment is more positive,...

In Australia, financial hardship caused by over-indebtedness is no longer only experienced by the most vulnerable social group but is now prevalent among the general population. This scoping paper analyses the money advice and debt management system in Australia with emphasis on their...

Over-indebtedness, defined as the inability for a household to meet both essential living expenses and debt repayments, continues to be a significant phenomenon throughout Europe. The problem plays out differently in various countries depending on the relevant credit market, culture around...

Using manually collected firm-level data on foreign subsidiaries, we examine the impact of internationalisation on analysts’ earnings forecast bias in Chinese multinational corporations. We find that analysts’ earnings forecast bias is stronger among multi-national firms when compared with...

We investigate the extent to which international and domestic economic policy uncertainty (EPU) impacts analysts’ earnings forecasts for Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) listed firms. Over a twenty-year period, we demonstrate that EPU is positively associated with analyst coverage, the...

This paper examines the fundamental role of security analysts as information intermediaries using recent advances in the realized variance literature. We construct a signal-to-noise volatility ratio to capture the efficiency contribution of analysts' recommendations while controlling for noise...

We examine the relation between analysts’ consensus recommendation changes and future stock price crash risk in recessionary economic conditions and normal conditions. We find that analysts’ downgrades are followed by a higher stock price crash risk in normal macroeconomic conditions, but a...

Random changes in firms' stock index membership have important implications on sell-side analysts' career outcomes. Covered firms moving from the bottom of Russell 1000 to the top of Russell 2000 significantly increase an analyst's likelihood of moving to a high-status broker or receiving a...

We document an improvement in analysts’ forecast accuracy following increased sector ETF ownership. We identify a possible channel for this result, i.e., because ETFs are more informative with respect to industry-level information, analysts learn directly and efficiently from ETFs about this...

We exploit the rich data of business groups in China and identify sell-side analysts following multiple listed firms within a business group (BG analysts). For a group firm, we find that BG analysts issue more accurate forecasts than non-BG analysts. Such an effect is more pronounced when the...

The HODL ideology overgeneralizes the buy-and-hold strategy for risky assets, leading to potential harm in investor wealth accumulation and investor-advisor relations. It originates from misunderstandings of financial theories, empirical evidence, technical analysis, and market timing. I provide...

This study documents economically meaningful and persistent financial advisor fixed effects in target firms’ abnormal stock returns shortly prior to takeover announcements.Additional difference-in-differences analyses suggest that advisors are associated with lower pre-bid stock returns after...

Professionally managed portfolios and ongoing advice can potentially help defined contribution (DC) participants achieve better retirement outcomes through personalized investing and saving guidance. This paper explores the relationship between trading activity and advice seeking among five...

We find that financial analysts provide more thorough forecasts when firms’ institutional investors are distracted (i.e., when firms are neglected). We establish the causality of the effect by identifying exogenous shocks leading to institutional investor distraction following Kempf, Manconi,...

This study examines whether and how brokers manage the distribution of their stock recommendations. We document that in a quarter if a broker’s percentage of buy recommendations in the first two months is substantially higher than the historical average, the broker issues significantly fewer...

Prior literature shows decision fatigue (the decline of decision quality after extensive decision-making) reduces analysts’ forecast accuracy. We study whether analysts strategically manage decision fatigue. Firms within an analyst’s research portfolio can differentially affect the...

Following the Global Settlement, analysts extensively use a top pick designation to highlight their highest conviction best ideas. Such a designation enables analysts to provide greater granularity of information, but it can potentially be influenced by conflicts of interest. Examining a...

We study financial analysts’ recommendation when firms receive contentious shareholder-sponsored proposals on governance-related issues. We find that analysts’ stock recommendations in the month immediately prior to the annual meeting (at which shareholder voting on contested proxy proposals...

This study compares three types of portfolio investment strategies: analyst-recommended, recommendation changes and momentum for the United States stock market. We compare these portfolios by period, size, and industry. Our results show that the momentum portfolio performs best across all...

Jensen and Meckling (1976) claim that by facilitating monitoring of firms’ activities, security analysis by financial analysts can reduce agency costs between management and external capital providers, and thereby increase shareholder value. Additionally, boards are required to design...

We examine article, author and firm characteristics of investment articles published by non-professional analysts on the social media investment platform Seeking Alpha from 2006 to 2020 leading to visible market value changes. We show that there are differences between articles followed by stock...

The goal of this paper is to identify influential analysts who generate abnormal returns when issuing a new recommendation by building a model that bets on the sparsity of typical analysts' recommendation data. Based on Bayesian techniques, we estimate a regression model for the abnormal returns...

This study examines potential effects of overconfidence on financial advice usage. Financial literacy overconfidence is defined as the gap between consumers’ subjective and objective financial knowledge. Using a representative national survey, the result shows that over 11 percent of...

This study documents economically meaningful and persistent financial advisor fixed effects in target firms' abnormal stock returns shortly prior to takeover announcements. Additional difference-in-differences analyses suggest that advisors are associated with lower pre-bid stock returns after...

Analyzing over 97,000 price target valuations from 2005-2020, we find analysts’ judgments reflect over four times more pessimism per dollar of negative earnings news for Non-White CEO firms, resulting in lower target valuations. These lower target valuations are associated with an increased...

We show that when the locations of analysts covering a firm are geographically more diverse, the individual forecasts of the analysts for that firm are less correlated. More geographical diversity of co-analyst locations leads to more accurate individual analyst forecasts. This suggests that...