Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2025

Abstract

We use COVID-19 and sell-side analysts as an experiment to study the effects of gender on labor productivity. We find that the forecast accuracy of female analysts declined more than that of male analysts, especially when schools were closed and among analysts who were more likely to have young children, were inexperienced, were busier, or lived in southern states of the US. Relative to male analysts, females also reduced their forecast timeliness and resorted to more heuristic forecasts but did not reduce coverage or updating frequency. Relative to pre pandemic, female analysts’ careers were more negatively affected than male analysts’. Overall, our results show that the pandemic impacted female analysts more than males through the quality of their forecasts but not the quantity.

Keywords

COVID-19, Decision heuristics, Financial analysts, Gender gap, Pandemic

Discipline

Finance and Financial Management | Gender and Sexuality | Portfolio and Security Analysis | Public Health

Research Areas

Finance

Publication

Review of Accounting Studies

Volume

30

Issue

2

First Page

1683

Last Page

1715

ISSN

1380-6653

Identifier

10.1007/s11142-024-09852-6

Publisher

Springer

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-024-09852-6

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