We analyze three different mechanical models to forecast earnings and compare their forecasts with those of analysts. Moreover, we evaluate implied cost of capital (ICC) estimates that are based on these forecasts. With our analyses we answer three open questions in the literature. 1) Do model...

How well do investors distinguish information that already is priced from genuinely novel and exclusive private information? This paper examines whether investors misweight information that already is in stock prices (“redundant information”) in making their trading decisions. I extend the...

Predicted stock issuers (PSIs) are firms with expected “high-investment and low-profit” (HILP) profiles that earn unusually low returns. We carefully document important features of PSI firms to provide insights on the economic mechanism behind the HILP phenomenon. Top-PSI firms are...

In this article, the Universal Approximation Theorem of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is applied to the SABR stochastic volatility model in order to construct highly efficient representations. Initially, the SABR approximation of Hagan et al. [2002] is considered, then a more accurate...

By issuing earnings forecasts for both current and future years simultaneously, managers provide the multi-year data required for many valuation models and help investors sort out transitory and permanent shocks. We find that firms that are overpriced and have more transitory earnings tend to...

The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the lack of analyst forecasts for half of all firms. Hou, van Dijk, and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts in order to compute ICC. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than...

This paper revisits two valuation models based on accounting figures: the Residual Income Valuation (RIV) and Abnormal Earnings Growth (AEG). Our research design has two approaches: i) we demonstrate theoretical integration of both models; and ii) we show in a practical manner that models...

In this paper, we employ the earnings model developed in Ashton and Wang (2013) to forecast the one- to three-year ahead earnings of individual companies. We find that the model produces forecasts of future earnings that are less biased and more informative than both the consensus analysts'...

This study provides empirical evidence for the efficacy of deriving firms' earnings forecasts from predictions of the complete, conditional probability density function (pdf). Relative to cross-sectional earnings forecasts based on OLS regressions, improvements of accuracy, bias and measures for...

The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the lack of analyst forecasts for half of all firms. Hou, van Dijk, and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts in order to compute ICC. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than...