Essays on Financial Markets

English This thesis studies financial markets and the information we can obtain from observing the actions of financial market participants. In the first chapter, I study how the combination of different accounting ratios, which are considered to be the financial signals of future performance, can affect the analysts' and managers' earnings forecast releases. The findings show that analysts treat the firms differently depending on whether the firms have only strong financial indicators (high signal group), weak financial indicators (low signal group), and those with both positive and negative signals (mixed signal group). The study also provides the evidence that the managers may realize the heterogeneity in analysts' treatment, and as the result the managers' earnings forecasts will be affected both by the signal group type of the firm and the analysts' bias characteristic for the appropriate signal group. At the same time, the findings show that the analysts sometimes fail to disregard the managers' forecast biases and are misled by the managers. This provides evidence of inaccuracy on the part of analysts and potential gaming on information disclosure between analysts and managers'. In the second chapter, I examine whether trading activity responds to the industry-related earnings announcement..