We examine whether earnings management spreads from firm to firm via board connections. We find that contagion of accounting quality occurs via directors in interlocking boards with other firms. A firm with director links to firms that restated earnings tends to have poorer accounting quality and higher likelihood of restating its own financial reports. A firm with director links to firms that did not restate earnings tends to have higher accounting quality. This evidence supports the idea that economic behavior such as accruals management spreads through social networks.

We examine whether earnings management spreads from firm to firm via board connections. We find that contagion of accounting quality occurs via directors in interlocking boards with other firms. A firm with director links to firms that restated earnings tends to have poorer accounting quality and higher likelihood of restating its own financial reports. A firm with director links to firms that did not restate earnings tends to have higher accounting quality. This evidence supports the idea that economic behavior such as accruals management spreads through social networks.

We study how institutional investor attention to a firm affects the timeliness of analysts’ forecasts for that firm. We measure abnormal institutional attention (AIA) using Bloomberg news search activity for the firm on earnings announcement days. We find that analysts issue more timely forecasts when AIA is high on the earnings announcement day. Analyst responsiveness to AIA is stronger when analysts have more resources and experience and weaker when the AIA of other covered firms is high. Analysts who respond more to AIA are more likely to be named all-star analysts and less likely to be demoted to a smaller brokerage. We address endogeneity concerns using a measure of expected AIA that is unaffected by concurrent information. Our findings suggest that responsiveness to institutional attention influences the production of analyst research and analysts’ career outcomes. This paper was accepted by Brian Bushee, accounting.

We exploit an exogenous shock to analyst coverage as a result of brokerage house mergers and closures to examine whether financial analysts influence the tax‐planning activities of the firms they cover. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, we find that, on average, firms affected by broker mergers and/or closures experience a reduction in their GAAP (cash) effective tax rates (ETR) of 2.5 percent (2.6 percent), relative to control firms, translating into average tax expense (cash tax) savings of $34 ($35) million. The treatment effect is more pronounced among firms with lower pre‐event analyst coverage. To explore how analysts affect tax planning, we further document that the treatment effect is greater among firms that lose an analyst who provided an implied ETR forecast in the past, suggesting that analysts influence tax planning via their tax‐specific research efforts. In addition, we find that after merger/closure, weakly governed firms increase their use of aggressive tax strategies, and financially distressed firms experience a larger reduction of cash effective tax rates, relative to control firms. Overall, we provide evidence that a shock to analyst coverage sufficiently changes the cost‐benefit trade‐off of tax planning.

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