All in a day’s work: What do we learn from Analysts’ Bloomberg Usage?

We use minute-by-minute Bloomberg online status data to characterize two important dimensions of sell-side equity analysts’ work habits: we estimate the average workday length (AWL) to proxy for analysts’ general effort provision and we use the percentage away day (PAD) to proxy for their soft information production. Both AWL and PAD vary much more across analysts than across time. Controlling for coverage, AWL is positively related to the quantity and the timeliness of analyst forecasts, while PAD is negatively related to quantity. Both are positively related to forecast accuracy, even after controlling for analyst fixed effects. COVID lockdown provides further causal evidence. Traveling analysts (with high pre-COVID PAD) experience a significant reduction in forecast accuracy during the lockdown. Using pre-COVID analyst commute time to instrument increased AWL during the lockdown, we find a higher AWL to significantly increase output and improve the accuracy of the forecasts.