Publications

Article

Cultural Diversity on Wall Street: Evidence from Consensus Earnings Forecasts

By: Kenneth Merkley, Roni Michaely and Joseph Pacelli

We examine how cultural differences among agents influence the aggregate outcome of a common forecasting task. Using both exogenous shocks to sell-side analyst diversity and panel regression methods, we find that increases in analyst cultural diversity positively... View Details

Keywords: Culture; Forecasting; Sell-side Analysts; Information Aggregation; Diversity; Forecasting and Prediction; Information; Performance Improvement

May 2018 (Revised June 2018)
Case

Cowen Inc.: Leveraging Data

By: Boris Groysberg, Sarah Abbott and Annelena Lobb

Cowen Inc.’s broker-dealer, Cowen and Company, LLC, boasted a number of analysts who had made prescient stock calls on the basis of creative data analysis. Now Cowen Inc. had opened a new subsidiary, Kyber, which would attempt to monetize new data science products.... View Details

Keywords: Data Science; Equity Research; Research Analysts; Investment; Analytics and Data Science; Equity; Research; Analysis; Competitive Strategy

Educators

Article

Managing the Narrative: Investor Relations Officers and Their Interactions with Sell-Side Analysts and Institutional Investors

By: Lawrence D. Brown, Andrew C. Call, Michael B. Clement and Nathan Y. Sharp

Investor relations officers (IROs) play a central role in corporate communications with Wall Street. We survey 610 IROs at U.S. public companies and conduct 14 follow-up interviews to deepen our understanding of the role of IROs in corporate disclosure events. Three... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Disclosure; Power and Influence; Business and Shareholder Relations

Web

Poor’s Manual: The Rise of Business Analysts - Railroads and the Transformation of Capitalism | Harvard Business School

Railroads Finance Management Business Analysts Mass Distribution Mergers & Syndicates Research Links Poor’s Manual: The Rise of Business Analysts New systems of accounting facilitated the oversight of... View Details

July 2015
Article

The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Investment Recommendations: Analysts' Perceptions and Shifting Institutional Logics

By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim

We explore the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings on sell-side analysts' assessments of firms' future financial performance. We suggest that when analysts perceive CSR as an agency cost, due to the prevalence of an agency logic, they produce... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility; Analysts; Investment Recommendations; Sustainability; Institutional Logics; Environment; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Investment; Corporate Governance; United States

March 2024
Article

The Asymmetric Mispricing Information in Analysts’ Target Prices

By: Jeremiah Green, John R. M. Hand and Anywhere Sikochi

We study the mispricing information present in the target prices of U.S. and international analysts. We hypothesize that asymmetry in the value-relevance of the information that managers supply to analysts, combined with asymmetry in the incentives facing analysts to... View Details

Keywords: Analysts; Target Prices; Mispricing; Cost Of Equity; Valuation; Price; Cost; Analysis; Theory

Article

End the Mythmaking and Return to True Analysis

By: Joseph B. Fuller

Keywords: Analyst Forecasts; Analysis

June 5, 2015
Article

How Banking Analysts' Biases Benefit Everyone Except Investors

By: George Serafeim, Joanne Horton and Shan Wu

Keywords: Banking; Sell-side Analysts; Financial Analysis; Financial Analysts; Career Management; Career Advancement; Labor Market; Prejudice and Bias; Investment Banking; Personal Development and Career

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2013
Book

Wall Street Research: Past, Present, and Future

By: Boris Groysberg and Paul M. Healy

Wall Street equity analysts provide research products and services on publicly-traded companies to institutional and retail investors to help them make more profitable investment decisions. During the last ten years Wall Street research has been battered by a series of... View Details

Keywords: Financial Analysts; Investment Banks; Conflicts Of Interest; Accounting; Financial Institutions; Financial Services Industry; United States

2016
Working Paper

The Search for Peer Firms: When Do Crowds Provide Wisdom?

By: Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang

In knowledge-based economies, many business enterprises defy traditional industry boundaries. In this study, we evaluate six "big data" approaches to peer firm identifications and show that some, but not all, "wisdom-of-crowd" techniques perform exceptionally well. We... View Details

Keywords: Peer Firm; EDGAR Co-search; Analyst Co-coverage; Wisdom Of Crowds; Performance Benchmarking; Crowd Of Crowds; Internet and the Web; Accounting

SSRN

June 2018
Supplement

Valuing Snap After the IPO Quiet Period (C)

By: Marco Di Maggio, Benjamin C. Esty and Gregory Saldutte

Analyzes Snap’s value and analyst recommendations following the events described in the (B) case. View Details

June 2018
Supplement

Valuing Snap After the IPO Quiet Period (B)

By: Marco Di Maggio and Benjamin C. Esty

Analyzes Snap’s value and analyst recommendations following the events described in the (A) case. View Details

2021
Working Paper

The Value of Intermediation in the Stock Market

By: Marco Di Maggio, Mark Egan and Francesco Franzoni

We estimate a structural model of broker choice to quantitatively decompose the value that institutional investors attach to broker services. Studying over 300 million institutional equity trades, we find that investors are sensitive to both explicit and implicit... View Details

Keywords: Financial Intermediation; Institutional Investors; Research Analysts; Broker Networks; Equity Trading; Institutional Investing; Financial Services Industry

SSRN

2024
Working Paper

Empirical Guidance: Data Processing and Analysis with Applications in Stata, R, and Python

By: Melissa Ouellet and Michael W. Toffel

This paper describes a range of best practices to compile and analyze datasets, and includes some examples in Stata, R, and Python. It is meant to serve as a reference for those getting started in econometrics, and especially those seeking to conduct data analyses in... View Details

Keywords: Empirical Methods; Empirical Operations; Statistical Methods And Machine Learning; Statistical Interferences; Research Analysts; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods

SSRN

Article

The Value of Intermediation in the Stock Market

By: Marco Di Maggio, Mark Egan and Francesco Franzoni

We estimate a structural model of broker choice to quantitatively decompose the value that institutional investors attach to broker services. Studying over 300 million institutional equity trades, we find that investors are sensitive to both explicit and implicit... View Details

Keywords: Financial Intermediation; Institutional Investors; Research Analysts; Broker Networks; Equity Trading; Institutional Investing

June 2018 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Valuing Snap After the IPO Quiet Period (A)

By: Marco Di Maggio, Benjamin C. Esty and Gregory Saldutte

Snap, the disappearing message app, went public at $17 per share on March 2, 2017, making its two 20-something founders the youngest self-made billionaires in the country. Over the next three weeks, 14 analysts made investment recommendations on Snap: two with buy... View Details

Educators