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...

We examine whether analysts’ engagement in earnings conference calls curbs real activities earnings management. We find that analysts are more likely to ask questions on discretionary expenses at conference calls of firms that are suspects of lowering discretionary expenses to meet or narrowly...

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...

Recent work shows that the role of accrual accounting in mitigating the timing differences between cash flows and operating performance has been disappearing over time (Bushman, Lerman, and Zhang 2016). We argue that even though there is noise in the accrual accounting process, sophisticated...

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...

We examine analysts' GAAP earnings forecasts and illustrate their usefulness in two prominent research settings. First, we find that the availability of GAAP forecasts has increased dramatically since 2003, and they are now available for most I/B/E/S-covered firms. Next, we utilize GAAP...

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...

I provide evidence that investors systematically overweight analyst forecasts by demonstrating that prices do not fully reflect the predictable component of analyst forecast errors. This evidence conflicts with conclusions in prior research relying on traditional approaches to predicting analyst...

This study examines the stock-price reactions to analyst forecast revisions around earnings announcements to test whether pre-announcement forecasts reflect analysts' private information or piggybacking on confounding events and news. We find that management earnings forecasts influence the...

Firms that report consecutive earnings increases, called earnings strings, receive an overvaluation from the stock market. We examine whether the presence of earnings strings affects equity research analysts' opinions beyond company fundamentals. We find that analysts issue more optimistic...