Using hand-collected biographical information on financial analysts from 1983 to 2011, we find that analysts making forecasts on firms in industries related to their preanalyst experience have better forecast accuracy, evoke stronger market reactions to earning revisions, and are more likely to be named Institutional Investor all-stars. Plausibly exogenous losses of analysts with related industry experience have real financial market implications-changes in firms' information asymmetry and price reactions are significantly larger than those of other analysts. Overall, industry expertise acquired from preanalyst work experience is valuable to analysts, consistent with the emphasis placed on their industry knowledge by institutional investors.
SELL-SIDEANALYSTS ARE AMONG the most important information agents in capital markets. As a result, a large body of academic research has been devoted to the question of what makes a good sell-side analyst. The literature shows that a number of innate characteristics and external factors such as analysts' forecasting experience, political views, portfolio complexity, and the prestige of their brokerage house are related to analysts' performance (Clement (1999), Gilson et al. (2001), Malloy (2005), Jiang, Kumar, and Law (2016)). Of these factors, practitioners indicate that industry knowledge is perhaps the most important quality an analyst can possess. Each October, Institutional Investor (II) releases its annual all-star analyst rankings, which polls buy-side institutions and ranks the top sell-side analysts in each industry. In addition to a list of top analysts, II provides information on the qualities that respondents view as most important. Industry knowledge has been consistently ranked the most important trait. Corroborating II's survey results, Brown et al. (2015) find that sell-side analysts also believe that industry knowledge is the most important characteristic related to their performance and career concerns. * Daniel Bradley is with the University of South Florida. Sinan Gokkaya and Xi Liu are with Ohio University. We appreciate comments from
The primary goal of bioprocess cell line development is to obtain high product yields from robustly growing and well-defined clonal cell lines in timelines measured in weeks rather than months. Likewise, high-throughput screening of B cells and hybridomas is required for most cell line engineering workflows. A substantial bottleneck in these processes is detecting and isolating rare clonal cells with the required characteristics. Traditionally, this was achieved by the resource-intensive method of limiting dilution cloning, and more recently aided by semiautomated technologies such as cell sorting (e.g., fluorescence-activated cell sorting) and colony picking. In this paper we report on our novel Cyto-Mine Single Cell Analysis and Monoclonality Assurance System, which overcomes the limitations of current technologies by screening hundreds of thousands of individual cells for secreted target proteins, and then isolating and dispensing the highest producers into microtiter plate wells (MTP). The Cyto-Mine system performs this workflow using a fully integrated, microfluidic Cyto-Cartridge. Critically, all reagents and Cyto-Cartridges used are animal component-free (ACF) and sterile, thus allowing fast, robust, and safe isolation of desired cells.
We study the drivers of persistent insider trading profitability by examining the trades of insiders whose past trades have been profitable. We find that the current transactions of these persistently profitable (PP) insiders better predict firm performance than those of other insiders. The relative abnormal performance is more pronounced for trades of insiders who are managers rather than large shareholders or unaffiliated insiders and for trades in firms with weaker governance and greater information asymmetry. The trades of PP insiders also better predict earnings surprises, major corporate news, and analyst revisions. Collectively, these results indicate that PP insider transactions provide valid signals regarding future firm performance and that persistence in profitability is driven by informational advantages.
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