Financial Analysts' Performance: Sector Versus Country Specialization

Frédéric Sonney

The Review of Financial Studies, 2009, vol. 22, issue 5, 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
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().