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...

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...

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...

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...

We investigate regulations intended to stop managers from privately disclosing corporate information to analysts in a setting with enhanced potential to isolate regulatory effects: the European Union (EU) Market Abuse Directive (MAD), a common regulation implemented by member states with varying...

I investigate the dynamics of analyst forecast errors relative to economic policy uncertainty and find a significant positive relation between economic policy uncertainty and analyst forecast errors. A doubling of economic policy uncertainty is associated with a 4.29 percentage points increase...

We examine the influence of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the characteristics of analysts’ earnings forecasts over a thirty-year period, spanning a wide variety of political and economic conditions. Motivated by both theory and empirical evidence that suggest a decline in the quality of...

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...