Previous research has shown that affiliated analysts (those who are working for investment banks that underwrite securities for companies) have an incentive to provide optimistically biased recommendations from selective information they are given by the firm. In an effort to halt such activities, as of October 2000, Regulation Fair Disclosure (RegFD) prohibits selective disclosure of material non-public information by public companies to privileged individuals (such as favored research analysts) and requires broad, non-exclusionary disclosure of such information. We examine firms’ stock price reactions to investment recommendation changes from affiliated analysts versus unaffiliated analysts from October 1998 to November 2002, around the passage of RegFD. Similar to previous research, we find that investors reacted more significantly to recommendation downgrades by affiliated analysts than to those by unaffiliated analysts prior to the passage of RegFD. However, we find that the difference in the reactions to recommendation changes is not present after the passage of RegFD. We also find that stock price reactions to analysts’ (both affiliated and unaffiliated) recommendation changes decreased significantly after the passage of RegFD. Thus, RegFD appears to have curbed the selective disclosure of information (particularly negative information) by firms to affiliated analysts. Further, the smaller reactions to recommendation changes by all analysts after RegFD may reflect a change in analysts’ behavior (irrespective of information that is available) or a response by corporate managers to withhold information rather than risking a violation of fair disclosure rules.

We provide theoretical and empirical arguments in favor of a diminishing marginal premium for market risk. In capital market equilibrium with binding portfolio restrictions, investors with different risk aversion levels generally hold different sets of risky securities. Whereas the traditional linear relation breaks down, equilibrium can be described or approximated by a concave relation between expected return and market beta, and a concave relationship between market alpha and market beta. An empirical analysis of U.S. stock market data confirms the existence of a significant concave cross-sectional relation between average return and estimated market beta. We estimate that the market risk premium is at least four to six percent per annum, substantially above traditional estimates. A practical implication for active portfolio managers is that the alpha of “betting against beta” strategies seems dominated by the medium-minus-high-beta spread rather than the low-minus-medium-beta spread. The success of such strategies thus largely depends on underweighting or short selling high-beta stocks.