It's All About Who You Know When Picking the Best Stocks

Want to find the best stock analyst for a certain company?

According to recent research by Harvard Business School professors Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy , school ties between equity analysts and top management of public companies led analysts to earn returns of up to 5.4 percent on their stock recommendations.

Their research is part of a bigger look at how social networks influence economic outcomes.

Read about the research in HBS Working Knowledge.

By the way, if you disagree with the results, don't provoke professor Cohen. He is one of the top powerlifters in his weight class in the United States, as this Boston Globe video demonstrates.

Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.

Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily's first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

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