Financial Analysts' Performance: Sector Versus Country Specialization

Frédéric Sonney

Review of Financial Studies, 2009, vol. 22, issue 5, pages 2087-2131

Abstract: Brokerage houses normally structure their research activities along either country or sector lines. I investigate whether organizational structure affects the quality of financial analysts' earnings forecasts. Specifically, I compare the performance of country-specialized financial analysts with that of sector-specialized financial analysts. The former issue forecasts considerably more accurately than the latter. Country specialists benefit from an informational advantage over sector specialists. A superior knowledge of country-specific factors, as well as geographical proximity between analysts and the firms they cover, are significant determinants of this advantage. The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2009

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhm024 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:22:y:2009:i:5:p:2087-2131

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www4.oup.co.uk/revfin/subinfo/

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Financial Studies is edited by Maureen O'Hara

More articles in Review of Financial Studies from Oxford University Press for Society for Financial Studies
Address: Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().