Common ownership and analyst forecasts

We examine the effect of the common ownership relation between brokerage houses and the firms covered by their analysts (referred to as co-owned brokerage houses, co-owned firms, and connected analysts, respectively) on analyst forecast performance. Common ownership can help the connected analysts h...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: CHENG, Qiang, LUO, Shuqing, ZHANG, Jinping
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soa_research/2031
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soa_research/article/3058/viewcontent/CommonOwnershipAF_av.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:We examine the effect of the common ownership relation between brokerage houses and the firms covered by their analysts (referred to as co-owned brokerage houses, co-owned firms, and connected analysts, respectively) on analyst forecast performance. Common ownership can help the connected analysts have better access to co-owned firms, leading to higher-quality analyst research. However, common owners have incentives for higher valuation of the co-owned firms and thus can exert pressure on the connected analysts to issue optimistically biased research reports for these firms. We find that common ownership improves analyst forecast accuracy. This result is robust to a difference-in-differences design that exploits exogenous shocks to common ownership. The effects vary systematically with the quality of alternative sources of information that analysts can access for the co-owned firms. Overall, our paper contributes to the literature by documenting that common ownership can facilitate information communication.