We posit and find that the importance of analyst and forecast characteristics for analyst forecast accuracy varies with analysts' access to management's private information and with the precision of publicly available information. In particular, more experienced analysts and All-Star analysts do...

Prior studies use fundamental earnings forecasts to proxy for the market's expectations of earnings because analyst forecasts are biased and are available for only a subset of firms. We find that as a proxy for market expectations, fundamental forecasts contain systematic measurement errors...

We investigate whether the reputation-herding theory or the tradeoff theory explains variation in the timing of individual analysts' forecasts. Using forecast accuracy improvements, forecast boldness, and the price impact of forecasts as measures of forecast quality, we find that in the...

Prior studies use fundamental earnings forecasts to proxy for the market's expectations of earnings because analyst forecasts are biased and are available for only a subset of firms. We find that as a proxy for market expectations, fundamental forecasts contain systematic measurement errors...