NBER Publications by Roger K. Loh

Not all stock recommendation changes are equal. In a sample constructed to minimize the impact of confounding news, relatively few analyst recommendation changes are influential in the sense that they impact investors' beliefs about a firm in a way that could be noticed in that firm's stock returns. More than one-third of the stock-price reactions to analyst recommendation changes have the wrong sign and only approximately 10% have significant stock-price reactions at the 5% level using an extended market model. We find that the probability of an influential recommendation is higher for leader analysts, star analysts, away-from-consensus revisions, revisions issued contemporaneously with earnings forecasts, analysts with greater relative experience, and those with more accurate earnings es...