E&F talk by Dimitrios Gounopoulos (Bath): Geopolitical Risk and Analysts Behavior

This study investigates whether the geopolitical risk would affect equity analyst behaviour in terms of their activity and the effectiveness of their forecast.

Our results show that geopolitical risk can impair the analysts’ optimism over a given equity and restrain them from issuing buy-sell recommendations, hence lower the analyst activity cross-sectionally and within firm. It also impairs the ‘informativeness effect’ related with the equity raising from the analyst recommendation.

Furthermore, we document that the negative impact of the geopolitical risk is durative and the actual realisation of geopolitical events cause the most negative impact on the analyst behaviour.

Overall, our results support that the geopolitical risk raises people’s vigilance, thus lower the activity of the information exchange and economic vitality.

To receive the link to the event, please contact Sven.Fischer@brunel.ac.uk