The Impact of Economy-Wide Sentiment on Analysts’ Research Activities
研究发现，以密歇根大学消费者信心指数衡量的经济整体情绪越高，分析师发布研究报告的频率越低，但私人信息挖掘的精度越高，报告对投资者的信息含量也越大。
In this article, we examine how economy-wide sentiment, measured with the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, affects analysts’ research activities. Using a firm-fixed effects design, we find that consumer sentiment, especially the component related to economic fundamentals, is negatively associated with analysts’ frequency of issuing research reports, but is positively associated with the precision of analysts’ idiosyncratic information, our proxy for analysts’ engagement in private information discovery. The evidence is more pronounced for firms with larger total assets, higher return on assets, better market performance, lower stock return volatility, and higher institutional ownership. We further document that analyst reports are more informative when consumer sentiment is higher. Taken together, our findings suggest that analysts respond to higher consumer sentiment by allocating more effort to private information discovery, which enhances the informativeness of their reports to investors. Our research reveals the impact of sentiment, a macrolevel factor, on analysts’ research activities, and it enriches the knowledge of analysts’ decision processes.