Finance Research Seminar - Zhi Da

Zhi Da - University of Notre Dame - Indiana

All in a day's work: What do we learn from Analysts' Bloomberg Usage?

Zhi Da

Azi Ben-Rephael

Bruce Carlin

Ryan Israelsen

We use minute-by-minute Bloomberg online status data to characterize two important

dimensions of sell-side equity analysts' work habits: we estimate the average workday

length (AWL) to proxy for analysts' general effort provision and we use the percentage

away day (PAD) to proxy for their soft information production. Both AWL and PAD

vary much more across analysts than across time. Controlling for coverage, AWL is

positively related to the quantity and the timeliness of analyst forecasts, while PAD is

negatively related to quantity. Both are positively related to forecast accuracy, even

after controlling for analyst fixed effects. COVID lockdown provides further causal

evidence. Traveling analysts (with high pre-COVID PAD) experience a significant re-

duction in forecast accuracy during the lockdown. Using pre-COVID analyst commute

time to instrument increased AWL during the lockdown, we find a higher AWL to

significantly increase output and improve the accuracy of the forecasts.

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• Analyst_GML.pdf