A team of accounting and finance scholars led by Laurence Brown of Temple’s Fox School of Business asked hundreds of Wall Street analysts how they did their work and viewed their role. Among the study’s more striking conclusions: 81.5 percent of analysts picked “hedge funds” as their most important group of clients (only 13.3 percent chose “retail brokerage clients”). Fewer than a quarter of the surveyed analysts said that the “accuracy and timeliness” of their earnings forecasts were very important to their compensation.