Brokerage houses usually organize their research activities by country or economic sector. We evaluate which research structure provides most value to investors. To do so, we study the relative information content of recommendations issued by country-specialized analysts and sector-specialized analysts. Our findings show that the former issue more valuable recommendations. The strength of country-specific commonalities and institutional factors explain at least part of the better performance of country-specialized financial analysts. Although analysts’ geographic location has been shown in the literature to be a significant determinant of earnings forecast accuracy, its relevance is more subtle when it comes to stock recommendations.

Using unexplored data on Swiss pension funds, we document substantial heterogeneity in cash holdings across funds. While we identify key operational and investments needs to hold cash, they only explain a small share of the variation in cash holdings. A large share of this variation is attributable to an unobservable, time-invariant, fund-specific factor. The average fund holds excess cash and slowly deploys it for investment. Funds with excessive cash holdings keep 8.4% of total assets in excess cash. Investing this surplus in a representative portfolio, could yield an additional expected annual return of 17 to 32 basis points, ultimately benefiting pension participants. Finally, small funds have larger cash holdings that are less responsive to specific needs, suggesting greater potential for reducing cash allocations.

We examine whether and how a US cross-listing mitigates the risk that insiders will turn their firm’s cash holdings into private benefits. We find strong evidence that the value investors attach to excess cash reserves is substantially larger for foreign firms listed on US exchanges and over-the-counter than for their domestic peers. Further, we show that this excess-cash premium stems not only from the strength of US legal rules and disclosure requirements, but also from the greater informal monitoring pressure that accompanies a US listing. Overall, because investors’ valuation of excess cash mirrors how they expect the cash to be used, our analysis shows that a US listing constrains insiders’ inefficient allocation of corporate cash reserves significantly.

We document a smaller expansion of the negative CDS-bond basis and lower selling pressure during the Covid crisis for bonds issued by firms with high environmental and social (E&S) scores, relative to bonds from low E&S firms. This pattern is consistent with lower investor outflows from sustainability focused funds rather than fund managers discriminating among which bonds to sell. Our results suggest that the relative performance of high and low E&S bonds during a crisis is influenced not only by shifts in firm fundamentals, but also by non-fundamental factors such as investor preferences and trading behaviour.