This study investigates the impact of media on analysts’ herding behavior when making stock recommendations. We find three main results. First, we find that analysts herd less when stocks are covered more in the media. Second, when the firm has negative media sentiment, analysts tend to herd more. Third, higher disagreement in the media is associated with a higher tendency to herd among analysts. These findings are robust to the confounding effect of news flows on returns as well as to alternative explanations. In addition, we find that the effect of media on the herding behavior is conditional on analyst characteristics.

This paper examines whether the trading activity of different investor types, institutional versus retail, can affect the relation between beta and average returns. We find that the beta-return relation is strong and positive on days with high institutional trading activity, and negative and significant on low institutional trading days. Our findings are robust and not driven by recently documented effects such as macroeconomic news and leverage constraints, among others. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the preferences and characteristics of various investor types, which are revealed through their trading activity, cause the slope of the Security Market Line to change.