We study how securities analysts influence managers' use of different types of earnings management. To isolate causality, we employ a quasi-experiment that exploits exogenous reductions in analyst following resulting from brokerage house mergers. We find that managers respond to the coverage...

An analysis of about 300000 earnings forecasts, created by 18000 individual forecasters for earnings of over 300 S&P listed firms, shows that these forecasts are predictable to a large extent using a statistical model that includes publicly available information. When we focus on the...

Using data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange we study the value added by (as distinct from the abnormal returns to) analysts' recommendations. Recommending brokers' clients trade profitably around positive recommendations at the expense of other brokers' clients. Significant profits come from...

We find strong evidence that analysts tend to have downward-biased earnings estimates immediately before merger announcement dates when earning announcement date is within a 60 day window prior to merger announcement date. Compared to pure stock deals, acquirer stocks in cash-only deals tend to...

We find strong evidence that analysts tend to have downward-biased earnings estimates immediately before merger announcement dates when earning announcement date is within a 60 day window prior to merger announcement date. Compared to pure stock deals, acquirer stocks in cash-only deals tend to...

Recent research finds that many analyst recommendation revisions take place shortly after earnings announcements. Altinkilic and Hansen (2009) attribute the clustering of recommendations to analysts strategically piggybacking on earnings information to improve the perceived performance of their...

This paper investigates the problem of time stamp errors in the IBES database, the most important data provider of analyst recommendations and forecasts currently. We compare IBES to alternative data sources and show that IBES announcement dates of both recommendations and forecasts are...

Recent literature documents that the issuance of analyst recommendations tends to coincide with important corporate events, but offers mixed evidence on whether such recommendations have added value. In this paper, we use large discontinuous stock price changes, known as jumps, to proxy for...

We constructed forecasts of earnings forecasts using data on 406 firms and forecasts made by 5419 individuals with on average 25 forecasts per individual. We verified previously found predictors, which are the average of the most recent available forecast for each forecaster and the difference...

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...