We study whether the financial analysts' concern to maintain friendly relationships with firms' managers in order to preserve their access to ‘soft' qualitative information entice them to issue pessimistic (“earnings surprise management” hypothesis) or optimistic (“management access”...

We analyze the determinants of financial analysts' forecast accuracy. The empirical literature has enlightened variables related to analysts, to firms or both, in explaining the magnitude of forecast accuracy. But this literature does not explain in a common framework two opposite theoretical...

Implemented in May 2007, the French rules governing commission-sharing agreements (CSAs) consist of unbundling brokerage and investment research fees.The goal of this paper is to analyze the effect of these rules on analysts' forecasts. Based on a sample of one-year-ahead earnings per share...

In multi-country studies, researchers frequently extract data in a single currency rather than in native currencies. This approach can be misleading for financial analysts' forecasts in the euro zone when researchers are using the IBES database. We suspect that forecasts of earnings before the...