Geopolitical Risk and Analyst Behaviour

Seminar abstract

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

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

How to join this seminar

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

We welcome you to join us online on Wednesday 9 February at 2pm.

We warmly encourage you to share with your friends, colleagues and classmates.

Speaker bio

Professor Dimitrios Gounopoulos is a Professor in Accounting and Finance in the School of Management of the University of Bath.

Prior Dimitrios served as Professor of Accounting and Finance at Newcastle University (Newcastle University Business School) and worked as well in;

• University of Sussex (School of Business Management and Economics),
• University of Surrey (Surrey Business School)
• University of Manchester (Manchester Business School).

He obtained degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Universities of Bradford and Leeds. In addition, he holds an MBA from Leeds University Business School and a PhD from Manchester Business School -University of Manchester.

He specializes in the initial public offerings (IPOs) and he is known for his continuous research involvement in this field. Over the last three years he has been involved into research on climate change.

Dimitrios has published his work in international journals including;

• Journal of Corporate Finance (x6),
• Journal of Banking and Finance (x4),
• European Financial Management (x3),
• Journal of Business Finance and Accounting,
• Journal of Management Studies
• Economic History Review

among others.

He is an occasional columnist in Columbia University, School of Law prestigious CLS Blue Sky Blog on issues relating regulations intervention and the FinReg Blog of Duke University.

He also participated in a consortium under 'Surrey Space Center' on a big project of European Space Agency concerning the 'Procurement and Development of an Active Debris Removal Mission'. The project was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Space Center in Florida, U.S.For his contribution on IPOs, he was honoured with a Gong Ceremony by the Oldest Stock Exchange in the world, the NYSE –Euronext Amsterdam.