In this paper, we identify a source of peer group influence that is plausibly orthogonal to information provision, yet nonetheless affects economic decision-making: the shock to an equity analyst of their undergraduate college football team winning the NCAA Championship Game. We find that...

We present evidence of first impression bias among finance professionals in the field. Equity analysts' forecasts, target prices, and recommendations suffer from first impression bias. If a firm performs particularly well (poorly) in the year before an analyst follows it, that analyst tends to...

We construct a measure of analyst-level distraction based on analysts' exposure to exogenous attention-grabbing events affecting firms under coverage. We find that temporarily distracted analysts achieve lower forecast accuracy, revise forecasts less frequently, and publish less informative...

This study presents direct evidence on the question whether investors recognize the widely documented biases in securities analysts' earnings forecasts. The internal rate of return implied by current stock price and consensus earnings forecasts is found to be correlated with indicators of bias...

We examine article, author and firm characteristics of investment articles published by non-professional analysts on the social media investment platform Seeking Alpha from 2006 to 2020 leading to visible market value changes. We show that there are differences between articles followed by stock...

Target prices are an estimation of the future value of a company’s stock price. Although there is a general consensus about the importance of firm’s fundamentals when forecasting, there are also other determinants. This article sheds light on the effects of uncertainty, financial stress and...

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...

We investigate the extent to which international and domestic economic policy uncertainty (EPU) impacts analysts’ earnings forecasts for Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) listed firms. Over a twenty-year period, we demonstrate that EPU is positively associated with analyst coverage, the...

Analysts' functions are divided into discovery and interpretation roles, but separating between the two is non-trivial. We conjecture that analysts' interpretation skill can be gauged by their forecast revisions following material unanticipated news — in particular following non-earnings 8-K...

We provide archival evidence on how a particular type of supplementary information affects the credibility of management earnings forecasts. Managers often provide detailed forecasts of specific income statement line items to shed light on how they plan to achieve their bottom-line earnings...