Sell-side fundamental analyst reports are highly valued in the financial industry and include three main quantitative components: earnings forecasts, target prices, and buy/sell recommendations. An important question for investment managers is then, how accurate are the forecasts of fundamental...

Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

Large earnings surprises and negative earnings surprises represent more egregious errors in analysts' earnings forecasts. We find evidence consistent with our expectation that egregious forecast errors motivate analysts to work harder to develop or acquire relatively more private information in...

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...

This study examines whether analysts' decisions to issue cash flows forecasts depend endogenously on their decision to use these forecasts to set target prices. An endogenous switching regression model, with analyst report regimes of disclosure and non-disclosure of cash flow forecasts, shows...

In this paper, we examine the predictive ability of direct cash flow information under IFRS. Employing a combination of in- and out-of-sample cross sectional models, we provide the first empirical evidence on the predictive ability of direct cash flow information in an IFRS environment. Under...

This paper examines the performance consequences of cutting discretionary expenditures and managing accruals to exceed analyst forecasts. We show that firms that just beat analyst forecasts with low quality earnings exhibit a short-term stock price benefit relative to firms that miss forecasts...

We propose an ex ante measure of analysts' production of private information (PPI) based on the correlations between analysts' forecast revisions and prior stock price changes. We validate this measure by examining whether analysts with lower correlations (higher PPI) provide more information...

We introduce a new way to measure the forecast effort that analysts devote to their earnings forecasts by measuring the analyst's general effort for all covered firms. While the commonly applied effort measure is based on analyst behavior for one firm, our measure considers analyst behavior for...