Sell-side fundamental analyst reports are highly valued in the financial industry and include three main quantitative components: earnings forecasts, target prices, and buy/sell recommendations. An important question for investment managers is then, how accurate are the forecasts of fundamental...

Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

We examine the effect of MiFID II, which mandated the unbundling and separate pricing of analyst research in Europe beginning in 2018. We find that the requirements of MiFID II were associated with a reduction in analyst following for European firms relative to US firms, with decreases in...

We use exogenous decreases in analyst coverage to examine how firm-specific analyst coverage affects media coverage. The loss of analyst information, on which journalists rely, raises the costs of developing a news article. Simultaneously, the loss reduces competition in the market for public...

Using the setting of extreme mutual fund flow-driven trading pressure, this paper examines sell-side analysts' role in stabilizing capital markets. We find that a select group of analysts persistently issue price-correcting recommendation changes for stocks experiencing mutual fund flow-driven...

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 how the quality of corporate disclosures impacts the precision of information that financial analysts incorporate into their forecasts of upcoming annual earnings. Our empirical measures distinguish between the precision of individual analysts' common and 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...

We examine the extent to which analysts who participate in earnings conference calls by asking questions possess superior private information relative to analysts who do not ask questions. Using a large sample of earnings conference call transcripts over the period 2002 to 2005, we find that...

This study examines whether analysts' decisions to issue cash flows forecasts depend endogenously on their decision to use these forecasts to set target prices. An endogenous switching regression model, with analyst report regimes of disclosure and non-disclosure of cash flow forecasts, shows...