Changes in Analysts’ Information Environment Following Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Global Settlement

This paper examines how governance and regulatory reforms surrounding the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 and the Global Settlement (GS) affect the analysts’ information environment, specifically the quality of financial analysts’ common and private information. Our information quality measures are based on characteristics of financial analyst forecasts as developed in Barron, Kim, Lim and Stevens (1998). We find that the passage of SOX and the concurrent analyst regulations are associated with a temporary increase in the quality of common information upon their adoption, but the increase is not maintained. By one year after the introduction of the reforms both common and private information quality decline and continue to stay below their pre-SOX/GS levels. This decline is clearly seen in firms with high information quality prior to the reforms, but firms with moderate or low prior information quality experience little if any improvement. These results suggest that overall, financial analysts have not experienced an increase in their information quality as measured by the characteristics of their forecasts.