The main objective of this paper is to examine the market reaction to the recommendation changes issued by financial analysts. We study the peculiar case of Italy where analysts have to send their reports to the Stock Exchange Commission and the Stock Exchange the same day they give it to their clients. Reports are available on the Stock Exchange website. Our dataset includes about 5,200 reports issued on the 117 IPO firms that went public on the Italian Stock market between 1st January 1998 and 31st December 2003. We calculate abnormal returns and abnormal volumes associated with the dissemination of the reports and perform two short-term event studies: the first associated with the “report date”, the second one with regard to the “public access date”, i.e. when the report is freely and publicly available on the Stock Exchange website. The event study related to the public access date show very different results. We do not find statistically significant average abnormal returns around this date, indicating that the market efficiently does not react to the mere publication of the report on the Stock Exchange website, since prices already included the effect of the recommendation change at the report date, i.e. when the new information was given to analyst’s private clients. It remains to be investigated if the abnormal returns before the report date are due to the effect of news different from the recommendation change or if they show a violation of the Italian regulation.

This paper investigates the dynamics of the Euro/US dollar exchange rate before, during and after the global financial crisis using intra‐day data in a sample covering the period 2003–2011. The paper extends over the conventional empirical framework and specifies an EGARCH (3,1) model to account for heterogeneity in three temporal trading zones and for asymmetric volatility to news. The findings indicate the presence and evolution of differences in Euro/US exchange rate dynamics across American, European and Asian trading zones before and during the financial crisis. As a result of the crisis, traders in the three areas have modified their reactions to scheduled news, unscheduled surprises and content of policies. Developing a better understanding of how traders' behaviour has adjusted since the onset of the crisis is an important issue given the global significance of this exchange rate and the considerable volatility experienced over the sample period.

Copyright belongs to the author. Small sections of the text, not exceeding three paragraphs, can be used provided proper acknowledgement is given. The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis (RCEA) was established in March 2007. RCEA is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to independent research in Applied and Theoretical Economics and related fields. RCEA organizes seminars and workshops, sponsors a general interest journal The Review of Economic Analysis, and organizes a biennial conference: The Rimini Conference in Economics and Finance (RCEF). The RCEA has a Canadian branch: The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis in Canada (RCEA-Canada). Scientific work contributed by the RCEA Scholars is published in the RCEA Working Papers and Professional Report series. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors. No responsibility for them should be attributed to the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.

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