Academics and practitioners have long recognized the importance of a firm’s industry membership in explaining its financial performance. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, recent research shows that industry-specific profitability forecasting models are not better than economy-wide models....

The size of the equity risk premium remains an unanswered question in the accounting and finance literature. This study proposes a new approach to reverse-engineer the equity risk premium, distinct from prior research, in that it does not rely on analysts’ forecasts to proxy for the market’s...

This paper extends the study of Herrmann and Thomas (2005) on granularity in analyst forecasts at multiples of nickels and finds that forecasts at multiples of nickels are more optimistic, and induce weaker market responses. Granularity in analyst forecasts combined with managers’ incentive to...

This study examines audit partners' predictions of the ability of managers and seniors to detect financial statement errors. If partners are unable to predict the ability of their subordinates to detect errors, audit effectiveness may be affected. Audit partners were asked to predict which...

Managerial behavior differs considerably when managers report quarterly profits versus losses. When they report profits, managers seek to just meet or slightly beat analyst estimates. When they report losses, managers do not attempt to meet or slightly beat analyst estimates. Instead, managers...

This paper examines cross-sectional differences in the optimistic behavior of financial analysts. Specifically, we investigate whether the predictive accuracy of past information (e.g., time-series of earnings, past returns, etc.) is associated with the magnitude of the bias in analysts'...

We investigate firms' propensity to meet analysts' forecasts of cash flows and earnings, and identify factors pertaining to market valuation, financial analysts, and firms' financial condition to explain why firms sometimes meet cash flow forecasts but miss earnings forecasts. Firms meet cash...

In this paper we examine the validity of using one-year-ahead cash flows prediction tests as a substitute for the value relevance test of earnings. We show theoretically that the R2 of the cash flows prediction regression is contaminated by the presence of (1) noise in the cash flows and (2)...

Under the assumption that audit quality relates positively to unobservable financial reporting reliability, we investigate whether audit quality is associated with the predictability of accounting earnings by focusing on analyst earnings forecast properties. The evidence shows that analysts'...

In this study, we examine how analysts are affected by the public actions of investors and other analysts by closely examining how analysts revise their earnings forecasts after an earnings announcement. In particular, we hypothesize that analysts observe the actions of investors and other...