This study provides evidence that differential interpretations are an important stimulus of speculative trading. We measure differential interpretations using data on analysts' revisions of forecasts of annual earnings after the announcement of quarterly earnings that are components of those...

Prior research reports seemingly conflicting evidence and interpretations concerning the relation between dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts and stock returns. Diether et al. (2002) and Johnson (2004) find a negative relation between levels of dispersion in analysts' forecasts and future...

This study examines how financial disclosures made with earnings announcements affect analysts' information about future earnings, focusing on disclosures of financial statements and management earnings forecasts. We find that disclosures of balance sheets and segment data are associated with an...

This paper presents a model that relates properties of the analysts' information environment to the properties of their forecasts. First, we express forecast dispersion and error in the mean forecast in terms of analyst uncertainty and consensus (that is, the degree to which analysts share a...

This study uses experimental data to compare the information generated by professional and nonprofessional investors when both groups receive access to the same financial disclosures. We also manipulate the disclosure level for both subject groups. Using the method developed by Barron, Kim, Lim...

In this paper we model return-earnings regressions in a setting in which analysts' forecasts are used to proxy for investors' expectations. We show how disparites between investors' and analysts' information sets could affect the regression coefficients and the R2. Our findings provide new and...

Large earnings surprises and negative earnings surprises represent more egregious errors in analysts' earnings forecasts. We find evidence consistent with our expectation that egregious forecast errors motivate analysts to work harder to develop or acquire relatively more private information in...

This study examines the association between firms' intangible assets and properties of the information contained in analysts' earnings forecasts. We hypothesize that analysts will supplement firms' financial information by placing greater relative emphasis on their own private (or idiosyncratic)...

In this study we examine changes in the precision and the commonality of information contained in individual analysts' earnings forecasts, focusing on changes around earnings announcements. Using the empirical proxies suggested by the Barron et al. (1998) model that are based on the...

Researchers in accounting have recently provided evidence of a striking increase in the usefulness of earnings announcements based on stock market price and volume reactions (Beaver et al., 2018; Barron et al., 2018). Price reactions, however, are unable to capture investor disagreement and volume...