In today's uncertain financial climate it is particularly important for entities to explain their financial performance relative to their expectations. Therefore, the paper analyzes the quality and quantity of management reporting in Germany's publicly traded MDAX and SDAX companies using a...

Prior studies identify several motives for why firms release management earnings forecasts (MFs). A common feature of such studies is they pool MFs when drawing inferences about a specific motive. By ignoring the heterogeneous rationales managers have to issue MFs, pooling could lead to biased...

We exploit a novel feature of management cash flow forecasts (MCFFs) to investigate how managers' discretion over forecast precision, clarity, and verifiability affects the bias, quality, and stock price effects of such forecasts. Many MCFFs are issued with an equivocal definition of the cash...

Prior literature documents the usefulness of the DuPont disaggregation for predicting firms future profitability, operating income, and stock market returns. In addition, research also emphasizes the importance of earnings quality information. However, there is a lack of research examining how...

The performance of analysts’ forecasts has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, as yet, no empirical study has investigated the nexus between the analyst forecast dispersion (AFD) and excess returns surrounding stock market crashes in any depth. This paper attempts to fill...

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...

Prior research generally argues that managers issue management earnings forecasts (MFs) to secure capital market benefits (i.e., reduce information asymmetry between managers and investors to lower a firm's cost of capital), to reduce the firm's litigation costs, or to allow managers to trade...

Prior studies attribute the future excess return patterns of R&D firms to either compensation for increased risk from R&D or to mispricing by investors. We suggest a third explanation for the future excess returns of R&D firms. We show that neither the level of R&D investment nor the change in...

Previous empirical evidence which evaluated the accuracy of management earnings or sales forecasts consistently revealed these forecasts to be on average significantly overoptimistic. However, all studies analyzed forecasts from public disclosures, which are an important signal to investors and...