Research On The Influence Of Analyst Herd Behavior On Stock Price Synchronization

In recent years,China's securities market has developed rapidly in the process of continuous exploration,and has made remarkable achievements.As an important information intermediary in the capital market,the behavior of securities analysts are getting more and more attention.As a bridge of information communication between listed companies and investors,analysts can explore and analyze the information of listed companies,contribute to the disclosure of information of listed companies,and help investors to deepen their understanding of listed companies,reduce the information asymmetry between investors and listed companies,increase the efficiency of resource allocation,and promote the good operation of capital market.However,on the other hand,analysts will also produce some behavioral deviations due to their own capacity constraints or related conflicts of interest in the development process.This paper is concerned about the herd behavior of the analysts and the economic consequences of their herd behavior in the process of forecasting.Herding behavior is a kind of special follower behavior,which means that when the information is uncertain in the market,investors are vulnerable to the influence of others,ignore their own private information,and produce the decision-making behavior of imitating others.After reviewing a large number of relevant literature,this paper finds that many scholars have some research on herding behavior,but mainly focus on the herding behavior of institutional investors and the herd behavior of investors,and they confirmed that herding behavior in the stock market will have a certain impact on the stock market.However,there is little research on the herding behavior of analysts and its impact on the stock market.Therefore,based on non-equilibrium panel data,this paper takes all Chinese A-share listed companies from 2003 to 2017 as the research sample,takes stock price synchronization as an index to measure the efficiency of stock market information,adopts the multiple linear regression model to explore whether the herding behavior of analysts will aggravate the synchronization of stock price,and also explore the interaction between institutional investors' shareholding ratio and investor sentiment and the herding behavior of analysts affects stock price synchronicity.The research results indicate that:(1)there is a significant positive correlation between analyst herding and stock price synchronization.Namely,when the proportion of analysts' consistent forecast behavior is higher,it will reduce and delay the incorporation of the company's trait information into the stock price will be reduced and delayed and stock price synchronicity will increase.(2)The institutional ownership ratio weaken the positive correlation between the herding behavior of analysts and the synchronicity of stock price.the increase of the proportion of institutional investors can help the company's idiosyncratic information integrate into the stock price.(3)Investor sentiment will deepen the positive correlation between analyst herd behavior and stock price synchronization,and further reduce the pricing efficiency of capital market.These results indicate that the herd behavior of analyst in our country is the "Genuine Herding",because they ignores private information and imitates other people,instead of the "Pseudo Herding" of making the same prediction based on consistent information.Therefore,this paper puts forward policy suggestions from three aspects:strengthening the talent construction of analysts,perfecting the quality of information disclosure of listed companies and guiding investors to invest rationally,so as to enable analysts to effectively play its information intermediary role,reduce stock price synchronization,promote the healthy and stable development of capital markets.