Which types of analyst firms are more optimistic? [An article from: Journal of Accounting and Economics]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Accounting and Economics, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Research optimism among securities analysts has been attributed to incentives provided by underwriting activities. We examine how analysts' forecast and recommendation optimism varies with the business activities used to fund research. We find that analysts at firms that funded research through underwriting and trading activities actually made less optimistic forecasts and recommendations than those at brokerage houses, who performed no underwriting. Optimism was particularly low for bulge underwriter firm analysts, implying that firm reputation reduces research optimism. There is also evidence that analysts at retail brokerage firms are more optimistic than those serving only institutional investors. We conclude that analyst optimism is at least partially driven by trading incentives.