Finally, an alternative explanation is that analysts revise their recommendations in reaction to earnings surprises to
piggyback on market-moving information.
6
Altinkilic and Hansen (2009) argue that analysts, by strategically issuing
recommendations on days of public disclosures, can improve the perceived profitability of their recommendations and thus
their standing in various analyst rankings. For instance, The Wall Street Journal's analyst ranking measures recommendation
profitability by cumulating security returns starting on the day (or one day before) the recommendation was issued
(Altkinkilic and Hansen, 2009, pp. 18–19). In theory, this creates an incentive for analysts to strategically time their
recommendations to improve their stock-picking performance and rankings. Groysberg et al. (2011) show that analyst
compensation increases as a function of analysts' Institutional Investor ranking