This article shows that aggregate analyst recommendations predict future aggregate excess returns at MSA and state level (i.e. local level). The results hold even after controlling for macroeconomic variables, industry and market returns, as well as investor sentiment. We also show that the...

I study security analysts' early forecasts. Forecasts with over one-year horizons constitute nearly one-half of all analysts' forecasts. I find that the demand for early forecasts is driven by long-term institutional investors and that analyst skills and resources are more important for...

Purpose: This study investigates the behavior of sell-side analysts covering firms that are about to experience breaks in strings of consecutive quarterly earnings increases.Design/methodology/approach: We estimate the likelihood of analysts predicting a break using logit regressions for 1.8M...

This paper focuses on the investment value of information contained in the tails of the analyst forecast distribution. I determine the investment value of the tails by looking at dissident analysts -- who release EPS forecasts far from the prevailing consensus. I then test the hypothesis that...

Regulators are not always able to anticipate how mandates will translate to financial reporting practice, particularly when managers are able to exercise reporting discretion. When XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language, was mandated by the SEC, financial analysts were among the...

We assess investment value of sell-side analyst recommendations from the standpoint of portfolio risk. We match I/B/E/S consensus recommendations issued for U.S.-listed equities during January 2015 with realized volatility of daily security returns up to one year following recommendation issue....

This paper builds on recent empirical studies that document the general impact of analyst recommendations on mutual fund trading. We argue that the use of analyst research might be a strategic decision depending on the type of mutual fund. Therefore, we identify the funds that trade in...

Risk forecasting is crucial for informed investment decision-making. Moreover, the salience of investment risk increases during economically uncertain times. In this paper, we study how sell-side analysts form expectations of firm risk, under different macroeconomic conditions (low versus high...

This paper examines the impact of teamwork on sell-side analysts' performance. Using a hand-collected sample of over 50,000 analyst research reports, we find that analyst teams issue more than 70% of annual earnings forecasts. In contrast, most prior research implicitly assumes that forecasts...

Through the difference-in-differences (DID) methodology, we find that the connection of China’s high-speed railway (HSR) as an exogenous shock could improve analysts’ forecast performance, leading to more accurate forecasts, decrease the dispersion between analysts, stimulate more forecast...