【主讲人】施雨水
【主持人】高明 副教授
【报告题目】Do Sell-Side Analysts Say "Buy" While Whispering "Sell"?

【报告摘要】I examine how sell-side equity analysts strategically disclose different information to the public and buy-side mutual fund managers to whom they are connected. I specifically test the possibility that analysts’ public recommendations tell the public to "buy" but they are whispering "sell" to their connected fund managers. I measure the likelihood of such "say buy/whisper sell" behavior based upon the percentage of managers' selling stocks that analysts recommend buying. Using mutual fund managers' votes for sell-side analysts in a Chinese "star analyst" competition as a proxy for managers' evaluations of analysts, I find that managers are more likely to vote for the analysts who exhibit more say buy/whisper sell behavior with these managers. This result suggests that managers receive more-precise information in private communications with an analyst than in the analyst's public recommendations and reward the favor by voting for the analyst in the "star analyst" competition. This different information disclosure by analysts results in a form of information asymmetry, which incurs a significant cost on uninformed investors; among analysts' positive recommendations, the stocks bought by the managers who vote for the analysts outperform the stocks sold by these managers around the recommendation dates.

【主讲人介绍】Yushui Shi (施雨水) is a Ph.D. job market candidate in Finance at University of California, Irvine. His job market paper studies how security analysts differentiate information disclosure strategies toward different audiences. His research interests are empirical asset pricing, behavioral finance, household finance, investments, financial network, and machine learning application with special focus on Chinese retail investor behaviors. He has publications in leading Finance journals such as Journal of Financial Economics. He completed his B.A. at Peking University in 2012.