Abstract We examine Twitter discussion of sell-side analysts’ stock recommendation revisions. While many investors lack direct access to analyst research, we observe revision-related Twitter discussion associated with approximately 90 percent of the revisions in our sample, usually within three hours of their announcement. Revision-related Twitter discussion is greater for upgrades and for analysts from larger brokerages. Examining within-revision intraday price discovery, we observe increased price discovery during intraday windows with more revision-related tweets, especially for tweets that have more user engagement, are posted by more influential authors, or involve stocks with more intense retail trading volume. We find that revision-related retail trading is more intense and better predicts future returns for revisions with more revision-related Twitter discussion. We observe no such evidence for institutional investors who have direct access to sell-side research. Our results suggest that Twitter is an important channel in facilitating price discovery following analyst revisions, particularly among retail investors.

We study lease accounting in an international panel data set to examine how accounting outcomes vary with two features of accounting standards: the emphasis on using professional judgement to apply principles, and the presence or absence of bright-line tests. We study four countries—Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US—and companies in two lease-intensive industries—retail and transportation. Our primary study period spans the time when Australia and the UK switched from domestic to international accounting standards, and in one test, we also consider Canada’s transition to international standards. We find that neither an explicit requirement to apply a principle nor omitting bright-line tests materially increases the use of capital lease treatment among these firms. Overall, we conclude that this financial reporting outcome is relatively insensitive to these standard-setting tools.