مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تاثیر حساسیت اقتصادی بر فعالیت تحقیقاتی تحلیلگران – Sage 2017

Sell-side equity analysts are important financial information intermediaries: They interpret and disseminate public information, and generate their own private insights (Chen, Cheng, & Lo, 2010). Given the prominent role analysts play in capital markets, both academic researchers and practitioners strive to understand analysts’ decision processes and the information content of their forecasts and recommendations. Schipper (1991), Ramnath, Rock, and Shane (2008), and Beyer, Cohen, Lys, and Walther (2010) provide comprehensive reviews of this literature. Although prior studies have offered important insight, the analyst literature largely focuses on economic determinants at the microeconomic level such as firm characteristics (e.g., Bhushan, 1989) and analyst characteristics (e.g., Clarke & Subramanian, 2006). With few exceptions (e.g., Hribar & McInnis, 2012; Walther & Willis, 2013), the link between analyst research activities and macroeconomic level factors has been underexplored. This study fills this void by investigating how analysts’ frequency of issuing research reports and their engagement in private information discovery vary with economy-wide sentiment. Our focus is consistent with Brown, Call, Clement, and Sharp’s (2015) survey results that, compared with forecast accuracy, analysts’ standing in broker votes and their success at generating trading commissions are more important to their job security, job mobility, and compensation. We measure economy-wide sentiment with consumer sentiment, which, as we discuss below, influences the ways investors use financial information and hence is expected to play an important role in shaping analyst research activities. Consumer sentiment reflects households’ perception of their income and wealth at present and in the near future (Ludvigson, 2004). It has been documented that household wealth is positively associated with equity investment (e.g., Friend & Blume, 1975). Peress (2004) proposes that households having more wealth to invest would acquire more information because the value, but not the cost, of information increases with the amount to be invested. Lewellen, Lease, and Schlarbaum (1977) confirm that expenditures on acquiring financial information are significantly and positively associated with the income level. These findings suggest that consumer sentiment affects the marginal value of analysts’ research outputs, as investors search for more information. Besides, the economics literature suggests that economic growth generates a larger amount of more precise information (Van Nieuwerburgh & Veldkamp, 2006; Veldkamp, 2006b). Thus, as consumer sentiment rises and declines along with economic booms and busts (Lemmon & Portniaguina, 2006), the varying amount of information through the business cycles should also have an impact on the marginal value of analysts’ research outputs.