This research examines the relation between analyst coverage and liquidity. While prior
studies has been undertaken in the United States, in the context of developed financial
stock markets and high IPO activity, out study focus on French context where financial
market is less active. Our findings are similar with those found by Roulstone (2003) and
Brennan and Subrahmanyam (1995) in the American market. Measuring liquidity using bidask
spread and effective spread, we show that liquidity is negatively correlated with analyst
coverage. We extend these studies by examining the role of analyst in mitigating illiquidity
due to minority expropriation problem. Our results show that the product of analyst
coverage b y minority expropriation risk is positively correlated to li quidity. There is no
consensus on how analysts provide information to the market. One steam of the research
argues that analysts provide public information and another stream documents that
analysts' proxy for the amount of private information and signal information asymmetry.
Our results indirectly corroborate the findings of Roulstone (2003), i.e. that analyst provide
public information to the market, reduce information asymmetry and increase liquidity.
Moreover, we infer that analyst reduce agency conflict by providing information to public
and diminishing information asymmetry which leads to mitigate illiquidity due to minority
expropriation risk.