We examine whether financial analysts—sophisticated market participants—are subject to limited attention. We find that when analysts have another firm in their coverage portfolio announcing earnings on the same day as the sample firm (a “concurrent announcement”), they are less likely to...

Despite the prevalence of IR among firms and its role as the functional area dedicated to financial communications, we know little about the relationship between IR and financial reporting quality. This paper examines the earnings management choices of firms with a professional IR presence. I...

The accounting literature has used the midpoint of range forecasts in various research settings, assuming that the midpoint is the best proxy for managers' earnings expectations revealed in range forecasts. We argue that given managers' asymmetric loss functions regarding earnings surprises,...

In a competitive information market, a single information source can only dominate other sources individually, not collectively. We explore whether earnings announcements constitute such a dominant source using Ball and Shivakumar's (2008) R2 metric: the proportion of the variation in annual...

Earnings announcement days on average provide more information to the stock market than any other days in each quarter. In particular, the proportions of the variation in annual returns explained by returns on days with dividend announcements, management forecasts, preannouncements, or 10-K and...

We argue that accounting conservatism makes earnings forecasting difficult by introducing transitory components in reported earnings. These transitory components are likely to be disproportionately represented in firms reporting losses. We show that analysts' mean forecast errors and absolute...