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...

Our study delves into analysts' motivation to issue concurrent cash flow forecasts in addition to earnings forecasts to achieve the analysts' specific strategic objectives. To investigate this motivation, we use economics based signaling theory and psychology based support theory to develop our...

Prior research finds that sell-side analysts are generally willing partners with company management in facilitating the consistent meeting or beating of earnings expectations. We examine analysts who demonstrate the opposite behavior: issuing an unusually optimistic earnings forecast at the end...

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...

The business press generally reports news in quarterly earnings announcements based on the difference between actual earnings and two salient benchmarks: earnings of the same quarter in the previous year, and a consensus drawn from a distribution of forecasts by financial analysts. We evaluate...

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...

We investigate the determinants of analysts' target price forecasts and evaluate their relative importance for explaining the cross-sectional variation in target price implied returns. We identify four broad determinants: the informational component predictive of future stock returns, errors in...

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...

We examine the relative accuracy of management and analyst forecasts of annual EPS. We predict and find that analysts' information advantage resides at the macroeconomic level. They provide more accurate earnings forecasts than management when a firm's fortunes move in concert with macroeconomic...