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.
Recent research has shown that a CEO's personal experiences in his or her early days have an influence on his or her decision-making as an executive later on. Our study extends this emerging stream of research by examining how CEOs’ pre-career exposure to religion affects their firms’ risk-taking and subsequent innovation performance. Drawing upon developmental psychology research and imprinting theory, we argue that CEOs who have attended a religious college are more likely to develop or reinforce their risk-averse mentality. This carries over to their professional life when they are in a top management position, and it leads to less risk-taking behavior in their firms and ultimately a lower level of firm innovation. Using a large sample of U.S. publicly listed companies, we find strong support on our hypotheses: Firms managed by CEOs who attended a religious college tend to be less risk-taking; this effect is stronger when the firm has more board members with pre-career exposure to religion; in addition, the firm's risk-taking behavior mediates the negative relationship between CEO pre-career religious exposure and firm innovation. We discuss the implications of our study for the strategic leadership literature, firm's risk-taking, and innovation research.
We investigate whether short interest affects supply chain partners' investments. This investigation is important for understanding the real effect of short sellers in facilitating stakeholders' investment decisions. Prior research suggests that short interest conveys negative news in a timely manner, which predicts future deterioration in firm fundamentals. We predict and find that a supplier's future investments decrease with its major customers' short interest. Consistent with predictions, this result is more pronounced when customers' short interest is more informative about their future performance, when customers have a more opaque information environment, and when suppliers incur lower customer switching costs. The results are robust when we use various approaches to address endogeneity concerns and establish causality. Our findings suggest that short sellers provide valuable information to supply chain partners when making investment decisions.