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Social Capital And Analyst Forecasts, Jing Dai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the effect of social capital on analyst forecast accuracy. Using a county-level measure of social capital, I find that firms headquartered in counties with high social capital have greater forecast accuracy than firms headquartered in low social capital counties. In addition, I conduct two cross-sectional tests under conditions where social capital facilitates analyst forecast information collection and where social capital provides more assurance of information reliability. I find that the effect of social capital is more pronounced when firms’ headquarters are close to analyst brokerage firms. This is because geographically proximate analysts may have more channels to …