This paper presents evidence that information asymmetry increases equity misvaluation by showing the impact of analyst coverage on misvaluation. To establish the causality, I use two exogenous events (broker closures and mergers), as well as an instrumental variable approach. The identification strategies indicate that there is a negative causal effect of analyst coverage on equity misvalutaion. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that information environment can cause investors to use their perceived value in cash flow and discount rate to estimate their perceived equity prices, which deviate from intrinsic value.

This paper proposes a novel channel through which innovation externalities can affect firm performance. I find cross-sectional evidence that the positive innovation outputs of customer firms increase their supplier profitability as measured by firm ROE. This result is robust to the inclusion of industry fixed effect, a control for both supplier and customer characteristics, such as ROE, advertisement expenditure, capital expenditure, firm age, industry concentration, institutional ownership, dividend yield, and a control for industry spillover or geographical spillover. To identify the causal effect of customer innovation outputs on supplier performance, I study an exogenous shock—State Street Bank and Trust Company v. Signature Financial Group, Inc.—and find that an increase in granted customer patents causes an improvement in future supplier performance. This effect is mainly driven by the demand channel and the knowledge diffusion channel from customers to suppliers.