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After controlling for economic performance (i.e., stock returns), we find that several proxies for analyst incentives as well as accounting-based fundamentals are related to an analyst's decision to drop coverage of a firm. When we separately consider the drop decisions of analysts with High vs. Low Experience, we find that Low Experience analysts place more weight on firm risk and decreases in liquidity when making their drop decision, while High Experience analysts place higher weights on accounting losses and decreasing SG&A margins. Lastly, when High (Low) Experience analysts initiate dropped coverage, their Low (High) Experience peers mimic the dropped coverage fairly quickly (fairly slowly).

I examine the relation between campaign contributions and stock returns during the Florida recount period of the 2000 presidential elections. Using the full population of publicly traded firms, I find an economically significant positive (negative) relation between pre-election campaign contributions to Bush (Gore) and stock returns during the 37-day election recount period. This relation exists for both the level and partisanship of contributions, and exists incrementally at both the firm and industry levels. These relations are robust to several different specifications, including alternative event windows that exclude the potentially confounding House/Senate races. The firm-level analysis is consistent with contributions being influence-motivated. Copyright 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

We develop parametric estimates of the imitation-driven herding propensity of analysts and their earnings forecasts. By invoking rational expectations, we solve an explicit analyst optimization problem and estimate herding propensity using two measures: First, we estimate analysts' posterior beliefs using actual earnings plus a realization drawn from a mean-zero normal distribution. Second, we estimate herding propensity without seeding a random error, and allow for nonorthogonal information signals. In doing so, we avoid using the analyst's prior forecast as the proxy for his posterior beliefs, which is a traditional criticism in the literature. We find that more than 60 percent of analysts herd toward the prevailing consensus, and herding propensity is associated with various economic factors. We also validate our herding propensity measure by confirming its predictive power in explaining the cross-sectional variation in analysts' out-of-sample herding behavior and forecast accuracy. Finally, we find that forecasts adjusted for analysts' herding propensity are less biased than the raw forecasts. This adjustment formula can help researchers and investors obtain better proxies for analysts' unbiased earnings forecasts.Gr egarisme ou dissidence? Estimations relatives a la propension des analystes au ralliement dans la pr evision des r esultats R ESUM ELes auteurs elaborent des estimations param etriques de la propension au ralliement (gr egarisme) induite par l'imitation que manifestent les analystes et leurs pr evisions de r esultats. En recourant aux attentes rationnelles, ils r esolvent un probl eme explicite d'optimisation avec lequel doit composer l'analyste et estiment la propension au ralliement a l'aide de deux mesures : en premier lieu, ils estiment les opinions a posteriori des analystes en utilisant les r esultats r eels ainsi qu'une r ealisation tir ee d'une distribution normale a moyenne z ero; en second lieu, ils estiment la propension au ralliement sans introduire d'erreur al eatoire, en