This paper presents results from an experiment and follow-up survey examining whether stock prices influence analysts' earnings forecasts. In our experiment, prices influence analysts' forecasts when uncertainty about future earnings is high, but not when uncertainty is low. Additional analyses...

This paper reveals that in addition to fundamental factors, the 52-week high price and recent investor sentiment play an important role in analysts' target price formation. Analysts' forecasts of short-term earnings and long-term earnings growth are shown to be important explanatory variables...

We document an improvement in analysts’ forecast accuracy following increased sector ETF ownership. We identify a possible channel for this result, i.e., because ETFs are more informative with respect to industry-level information, analysts learn directly and efficiently from ETFs about this...

Previous research finds that historical seasonal earnings rank negatively predicts stock returns surrounding earnings announcements (EAs) in China’s A-share markets. We examine whether management earnings forecasts (MEFs) help reduce the stock return seasonality associated with earnings...

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...

Measures of a firm's financial strength forecast stock returns. The relation between financial condition and future returns, however, is consistent with two explanations: (1) changes in investors' expectations are impounded gradually over time and, (2) riskier firms - with higher discount rates...

In recent studies, the analysts' consensus forecasts are widely used as a proxy for the unobservable market's consensus expectation of future earnings. As prior studies indicate, the analysts' consensus forecasts measure the true underlying construct with errors and the errors may vary...

This paper examines the impact of expectations manipulation on the usefulness of analyst forecasts in the residual income valuation model. Recognizing that firms may guide down analyst forecast to either truthfully communicate information (legitimate guidance) or mislead analysts to produce...

We extend prior research examining the relation between aggregate recommendation changes and future returns by documenting that this relation varies over time as a function of the predictability of future earnings growth. When industry-level earnings growth is more predictable, we find that...