Person:

Groysberg, Boris

Prior research on equity analysts focuses almost exclusively on those employed by sell-side investment banks and brokerage houses. Yet investment firms undertake their own buy-side research, and their analysts face different stock selection and recommendation incentives than their sell-side peers. We examine the selection and performance of stocks recommended by analysts at a large investment firm relative to those of sell-side analysts from mid-1997 to 2004. We find that the buy-side firm's analysts issue less optimistic recommendations for stocks with larger market capitalizations and lower return volatility than their sell-side peers, consistent with their facing fewer conflicts of interest and having a preference for liquid stocks. Tests with no controls for these effects indicate that annualized buy-side Strong Buy/Buy recommendations underperform those for sell-side peers by 5.9% using market-adjusted returns and by 3.8% using four-factor model abnormal returns. However, these findings are driven by differences in the stocks recommended and their market capitalization. After controlling for these selection effects, we find no difference in the performance of the buy- and sell-side analysts' Strong Buy/Buy recommendations.

A firm's competitive environment, its strategic choices, and its internal capabilities are considered important determinants of its future performance. Yet there is little evidence on whether analysts' forecasts of firm performance actually reflect any of these factors and which are considered most important. We use survey data from 967 analysts ranking 837 companies to judge how their forecasts are related to evaluations of firms' industry competitiveness, strategic choices, and internal capabilities. Forecasts are generally associated with many of the factors that money managers rate as important in their assessments of analyst contributions, including industry growth and competitiveness, low-price strategy, strategy execution, top management quality, innovation, and performance-driven culture. We also find wide variation across variables for ratings consistency among analysts covering the same firm. On average, consistency is higher for sell-side than buy-side analysts, consistent with sell-side analysts facing greater incentives to herd.