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Personal Financial Distress, Limited Attention, and Sell-Side Analysts

By linking sell-side equity analysts to their deed records and LinkedIn profiles, I show that analysts with higher exposure to negative wealth shocks issue more pessimistic and less accurate forecasts. The effects are stronger when analysts have higher leverage in their homes and face career concerns. I also find that stocks recommended by exposed analysts underperform those of non-exposed counterparts, by an amount that is significant and economically large in magnitude. The results remain robust to unobserved skill differences, the potential endogeneity of housing prices, the self-selection of analysts into neighborhoods with certain traits, and placebo tests where housing wealth shocks are randomized across analysts. Collectively, this study provides new evidence on if and how personal wealth shocks impact analysts' work productivity and forecast behavior.