ABSTRACT Our objective is to penetrate the “black box” of sell‐side financial analysts by providing new insights into the inputs analysts use and the incentives they face. We survey 365 analysts and conduct 18 follow‐up interviews covering a wide range of topics, including the inputs to analysts’ earnings forecasts and stock recommendations, the value of their industry knowledge, the determinants of their compensation, the career benefits of Institutional Investor All‐Star status, and the factors they consider indicative of high‐quality earnings. One important finding is that private communication with management is a more useful input to analysts’ earnings forecasts and stock recommendations than their own primary research, recent earnings performance, and recent 10‐K and 10‐Q reports. Another notable finding is that issuing earnings forecasts and stock recommendations that are well below the consensus often leads to an increase in analysts’ credibility with their investing clients. We conduct cross‐sectional analyses that highlight the impact of analyst and brokerage characteristics on analysts’ inputs and incentives. Our findings are relevant to investors, managers, analysts, and academic researchers.

ABSTRACT We examine the influence of mobile communication on local information flow and local investor activity using the enforcement of statewide distracted driving restrictions, which are exogenous events that constrain mobile communication while driving. By restricting mobile communication across a potentially sizable set of local individuals, these restrictions could inhibit local information flow and, in turn, the market activity of stocks headquartered in enforcement states. We first document a decline in Google search activity for local stocks when restrictions take effect, suggesting that constraints on mobile communication significantly affect individuals’ information search activity. We further find significant declines in local trading volume when restrictions are enforced. This drop in liquidity is (1) attenuated when laws provide substitutive means of mobile communication and (2) magnified when locals have long car commutes and when their daily commutes overlap with regular exchange hours. Moreover, trading volume suffers the most for local stocks with lower institutional ownership, less analyst coverage, and more intangible information. Additional analyses show lower intraday volume during local commute times when mobile connectivity is constrained. Together, our results suggest that local information and local investors matter in stock markets and that mobile communication is an important mechanism through which these elements operate to affect liquidity and price discovery.

ABSTRACT There is a debate in the literature as to whether employee selection is a substitute or complement to incentive contracting. We argue that incentive contracts and selection can be both complements and substitutes conditional on the contracting difficulty faced by the firm. We examine these control choices in a setting where contracting difficulties arise due to the firm's choice of strategy and from the volatility created by the firm's external environment. We select a firm's commitment to organizational learning (OL) as our strategic choice variable as this provides a useful proxy for identifying settings where explicit incentive contracting is difficult. The results show that, as firms become increasingly committed to OL, incentive contracts and employee selection operate as complements. However, with a high commitment to OL and an increasing level of external volatility, contracting on performance measures will become less effective. In this context, our results indicate that there is a substitution effect toward employee selection.