The increasing demand for business analysts in recent years has brought about the need for a proper articulation of the Business Analyst’s role. Despite the growth of the business analysis field, and its value, academic research on the practices, competencies and capabilities of a business analyst is still limited. Drawing on the Resource-Based View of the firm theory and the concept of practice, this study proposes a business analysis capability model. A positivist qualitative research methodology has been conducted using a directed content-based analysis approach. This research analysed 300 business analyst online job advertisements in order to identify the practices, competencies and capabilities of business analysts as perceived by employers based in South Africa (SA) and the United Kingdom (UK). The findings suggest that, both in SA and the UK, analysts with systems skills, practices, competencies and capabilities are preferred by employers over those with business skills. The results of the study suggest that South African employers demand additional skills, practices and competencies from a business analyst than are required by employers based in the UK. This suggests that SA based business analysts are capable of competing for employment in the UK without the need for them to acquire additional skills. This research makes conceptual contributions to academia, and also offers managerial contributions to practice.

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Betul Mollahaliloglu

<p>The Swedish population has the world’s largest percentage of shareholders either by direct or indirect owning. Due to the increasing interest of equity capital markets, private as well as institutional investors rely on forecasts from financial analysts. The reason for this is due to the lack of expertise among investors in this area. </p><p>Due to the fact that analysts influence the Swedish stock market immensely, it’s of great interest to explore whether an analyst can be seen as a rational participant. At the same time, we would like to see what impact psychological factors have on the analysts in their work and which these psychological factors are.</p><p>To battle these questions, we have chosen to take a qualitative approach in our research, basing it on interviews. In our opinion, interviewing a person gives a more balanced picture as the respondents have the possibility to have a dialog/discussion with the interviewer. The selection of interviewees was not random, instead we chose to interview nine different financial analysts working for big popular firms in Stockholm and Copenhagen. </p><p>Our research presents the psychological factors which affect financial analysts. We are convinced to have found strong enough indications to draw general conclusions for financial analysts, active on the Nordic stock market. </p><p>The study has shown a given relation between experience and psychological effects. The awareness of the psychological impact on the stock market exists among all financial analysts. But we have found that it’s more likely for an inexperienced financial analyst to be affected by these. The factors that have the largest effect on analysts are mostly trends, herding, overreaction and noise. </p><p>Finally our research shows a psychological position of dependence for the companies the analyst value. These are the providers of information for analysts, in practice a sale recommendation can lead to less information being shared with him or her. Further on, it’s generally seen to be more commercial correct publishing a buy recommendation as these generate more incomes and business connection for the analyst’s employer. The conclusions points out that an analyst often adopts over-optimism when analysing companies.</p>

The Swedish population has the world’s largest percentage of shareholders either by direct or indirect owning. Due to the increasing interest of equity capital markets, private as well as institutional investors rely on forecasts from financial analysts. The reason for this is due to the lack of expertise among investors in this area. Due to the fact that analysts influence the Swedish stock market immensely, it’s of great interest to explore whether an analyst can be seen as a rational participant. At the same time, we would like to see what impact psychological factors have on the analysts in their work and which these psychological factors are. To battle these questions, we have chosen to take a qualitative approach in our research, basing it on interviews. In our opinion, interviewing a person gives a more balanced picture as the respondents have the possibility to have a dialog/discussion with the interviewer. The selection of interviewees was not random, instead we chose to interview nine different financial analysts working for big popular firms in Stockholm and Copenhagen. Our research presents the psychological factors which affect financial analysts. We are convinced to have found strong enough indications to draw general conclusions for financial analysts, active on the Nordic stock market. The study has shown a given relation between experience and psychological effects. The awareness of the psychological impact on the stock market exists among all financial analysts. But we have found that it’s more likely for an inexperienced financial analyst to be affected by these. The factors that have the largest effect on analysts are mostly trends, herding, overreaction and noise. Finally our research shows a psychological position of dependence for the companies the analyst value. These are the providers of information for analysts, in practice a sale recommendation can lead to less information being shared with him or her. Further on, it’s generally seen to be more commercial correct publishing a buy recommendation as these generate more incomes and business connection for the analyst’s employer. The conclusions points out that an analyst often adopts over-optimism when analysing companies.

In this dissertation, I examine investors' use of balance sheet information to infer earnings management constraint and the extent to which they utilize that information to assess the quality of subsequent earnings surprises. Ex-ante constrained firms may not have sufficient ability to manage earnings towards desired earnings thresholds and thus their reported earnings surprises are more likely to be the result of real performance. Ex-ante flexible firms, however, have more room to manage earnings and so it becomes less clear to investors whether the reported earnings surprises are the result of real performance or earnings management. My tests provide mixed support for the constraint theory. I find evidence that the market reacts more to small positive earnings surprises when they are reported by ex-ante constrained firms than when reported by ex-ante flexible firms. This suggests that the market interprets the earnings surprise reported by constrained firms to be of higher quality. However, I also find that earnings surprises reported by ex-ante constrained firms are no more persistent with regard to one-year-ahead earnings than those reported by ex-ante flexible firms, a result that is not consistent with the differential reaction to earnings surprises.

archives@tulane.edu / Using hand-collected, professional designations of equity analysts as proxies for analyst accounting skills, this paper finds that analysts with strong accounting skills understand the net operating assets (NOA) anomaly. They provide more accurate and less optimistic earnings forecasts for firms with higher NOA. However, at the same time, they issue more optimistic recommendations for the same high NOA firms. This paper argues that conflicts of interests and the ways skilled analysts strategically incorporate the information into their outputs to achieve incentive-based goals drive this inconsistency. This strategic behavior of skilled analysts tends to create price discrepancies and might suggest that the NOA anomaly is more behavior-driven and less risk-oriented. / 1 / Miao He

My dissertation consists of three chapters that examine how information production by financial intermediaries impacts on the capital market.My first chapter investigates whether extreme but rare events, i.e., major climatic disasters, influence the productivity of professional financial analysts, whose output is highly crucial in the capital market. We use 21 major natural disasters in the U.S. and find that disaster-zone analysts reduce their forecast accuracy by reiterating their previous forecast within 3 months after disasters. This effect is driven by distracted attention, rather than resource constraints. Though the effect is short term, we reveal a spillover negative impact from climatic disasters to information environment of firms which do not experience disasters, via the channel of disaster-zone analysts, highlighting the importance of the financial intermediary and also the economic consequences of severe climate events. My second chapter is motivated by the increasing global expansion by U.S. firms in recent decades and examines how geographic distribution of U.S. firms’ offshore network affects the coverage incentive of non-U.S. analysts. We combine analyst country location database and the novel dataset of offshore activities by Hoberg and Moon (2017) who quantify a U.S. firm’s local exposure in a foreign country and we discover that foreign analysts, are more likely to initiate coverage of U.S. firms with offshore activities in their domiciled countries and provide more accurate forecasts compared to non-domiciled foreign analysts. This study uncovers an important channel, i.e., offshore network, through which non-U.S. analysts can contributes to U.S. market with information advantage. In my third chapter, I study an emerging group of equity analysts, i.e., social media analysts, who post equity research on social media platforms and share investment opinions. I employ initial public offering (IPO) as a laboratory setting because during pre-IPO period, a period with high information asymmetry, professional sell-side analysts are restricted to issue reports under the restriction enforced by SEC, which provides a great setting to study the informational role of this group. I exploit research articles on Seeking Alpha website and find that pre-IPO social media analyst coverage has a positive impact on first day initial return, with the effect driven by heightened retail investor attention. This study highlights the role of social media analysts, as a new information intermediary in the capital market during the internet era. / Business Administration/Finance

The role of analysts in corporate governance has been examined extensively in the accounting literature. Two conflicting representations of the influence of analysts have emerged. Analysts are either viewed as external monitors of corporate behavior, thereby reducing agency costs; or they are viewed as exerting additional pressure on management to meet earnings forecasts, which may contribute to aggressive corporate behavior. Studies exist that examine the impact of analyst coverage in a financial reporting context. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of analysts in the corporate tax reporting context. This dissertation examines the impact of analyst coverage on corporate tax aggressiveness using a cross-section of publicly traded firms between 1992 and 2006. Permanent discretionary book-tax differences are used to proxy for tax aggressiveness. The relation is examined using ordinary least squares regression as well as two-stage least squares regression using expected coverage and inclusion in the S&P 500 index as instrumented variables to account for the endogeneity of analyst coverage selections. Additional analyses investigate the impact of analyst characteristics: experience as an analyst, experience covering a specific firm and identification as a top analyst. Results indicate that analyst coverage is associated with lower levels of tax aggressiveness. This finding suggests that analysts serve as external monitors of corporate tax behavior. In addition, more experienced analysts are associated with lower levels of tax aggressiveness indicating an improvement in monitoring ability with experience. Analysts identified as All-American analysts by Institutional Investor magazine are associated with higher levels of tax aggressiveness. This result suggests that top analysts may view aggressive tax behavior as a wealth creation tool for firms. / Ph. D.

There are a large number of investors and companies reliant upon analyst earnings forecasts. Missing analyst forecasts can have a massive impact on share price and investors often look to these values to make decisions regarding future investment decisions. However, there has been a great deal of speculation about these forecasts and especially the error associated with them. With the threat of an impending recession, it is important to know the reliability of forecasts during times leading up to recessions. More specifically, this study aims to see how the level of error associated with analyst earnings forecasts change leading up to recessions and whether or not they should be relied upon as heavily during these times.

This study examines the tone of management disclosures and their impact on capital markets. In particular, I examine the positive and negative tone, as defined by the Harvard IV-4 Dictionary, during conference calls and the impact on analyst accuracy, dispersion of analysts' estimates, cumulative abnormal returns, abnormal trading volumes, and the number of days after the end of the quarter. Results indicate that pessimism is significantly related to decreased analyst accuracy. A one percent increase in the pessimism of a conference call results in a decrease in analyst accuracy by approximately 10%. In addition, an increase in pessimism is associated with an increase in the dispersion of analysts' estimates. Pessimism is related to negative abnormal returns in the 30 days after the end of the conference call and also to increased trading volume in the three days after the conference call. A one percent increase in the pessimism of a conference call is related to a negative abnormal return of approximately .4%. These findings are consistent with the theory that the positive and negative tone of a conference call provides incremental information to the capital markets. I am unable to find significant results for an increase in the number of days between the end of the quarter and the conference call date. These results are robust to using a more financially oriented dictionary created by Loughran and McDonald (2011) / Ph. D.