Adam Cobb, University of Texas

In recent years, organizational scholars have documented the many ways in which contemporary organizations radically differ from their predecessors, thus rendering obsolete many of our existing ways of categorizing firms. We attempt to overcome this challenge by introducing a new measure to assess the degree of similarity between firms: analyst-based similarity. Publicly- traded firms are routinely covered by one or more sell-side stock analysts. Embedded in these coverage patterns are analyst assignment decisions made by investment banks that consciously aim to reduce information acquisitions costs by assigning analysts to similar sets of firms. Thus, analyst coverage patterns reflect underlying similarities among firms in the eyes of a key audience for corporate organizations: investment banks and the broader investment community. Leveraging the overlapping coverage patterns of sell-side market analysts, we create a network- based, dyadic annual measure of similarity among all publicly traded firms from 1990-2020. We use this measure to predict similarity among a set of corporate decisions and outcomes, including corporate time horizons, corporate political activity, and measures of stakeholder performance.