Analysts’ Institutional Client Catering and Reputation Tradeoff: Strategic Timing of Recommendations

Abstract

We examine whether sell-side analysts strategically time their favorable recommendations to cater to institutional investors while preserving analysts’ reputational capital. Though prior literature documents that analysts provide more positive recommendations for stocks that are part of their institutional clients’ (specifically, mutual funds’) portfolios, it does not explicitly address a reputation cost associated with such practice. Using a sample of analysts’ recommendations on U.S. firms for the 2002-2017 period, we document a pattern of analysts’ recommendations being more optimistic in the end month of a quarter and less optimistic in the beginning month of a quarter. This timing pattern ties to quarterly reporting periods of portfolio managers, with actively managed mutual funds’ holdings being affected the most. Analysts with Institutional Investor All-Star ranking do not engage in such stock recommendation timing practices. The market participants seem to believe rosy recommendations issued for stocks with more institutional holdings in the end month of a quarter with more positive cumulative abnormal returns to upgrade and downgrade recommendations.

Keywords: Financial analysts, Analyst recommendations, Institutional catering, Reputation

JEL Classification: G14, G24