Seniority's Differential Roles Among Sell‐Side Analysts

This study shows that reports issued by analyst teams with higher average seniority, proxied by either weighted number of reports issued or days of experience served as an analyst, are associated with better research quality in terms of higher forecast accuracy and market impact. But among individual analysts that work alone, where cooperation and labour division are not feasible, higher seniority won't predict higher research quality. In additional analyses, I further study team‐change events, compare seniority with hierarchy in report timeliness, and explore seniority's role in information learning. Results indicate seniority plays important yet differential roles in overall research quality.