Time：12:00-13:00, Jan.5th, 2021 Tuesday

Venue：Tongji Building Block A Room 505

Speaker： Shu Haibing Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Abstract:

Using hand-collected data on analysts’ activities on WeChat, we investigate how career concern distorts analysts’ effort allocation and its outcomes. We find analysts tend to write more WeChat tweets with more colorful expressions, promotion photos, and number of words when approaching next Star contest voting period. The effort on writing tweets significantly helps analysts win Star competition, while traditional effort like making more and better forecasts is useless. Instrumented by the number of months since last Star tournament, we find more effort on writing tweets leads to bolder but less accurate and informative earnings forecast and recommendations. Taking advantage of an exogenous shock which had led to the suspension of Star tournament, we find similar results using difference-in-differences analysis.