Do Security Analysts Speak in Two Tongues?
研究证券分析师为何发布过于乐观的推荐，区分战略动机（如迎合管理层）与非战略动机（真正过度乐观），发现战略扭曲者推荐乐观但预测保守，并构建“两种语言指标”检测激励扭曲。
Why do security analysts issue overly positive recommendations? We propose a novel approach to distinguish strategic motives (e.g., generating small-investor purchases and pleasing management) from nonstrategic motives (genuine overoptimism). We argue that nonstrategic distorters tend to issue both positive recommendations and optimistic forecasts, while strategic distorters “speak in two tongues,” issuing overly positive recommendations but less optimistic forecasts. We show that the incidence of strategic distortion is large and systematically related to proxies for incentive misalignment. Our “two-tongues metric” reveals strategic distortion beyond those indicators and provides a new tool for detecting incentives to distort that are hard to identify otherwise.