Analysts' functions are divided into discovery and interpretation roles, but separating between the two is non-trivial. We conjecture that analysts' interpretation skill can be gauged by their forecast revisions following material unanticipated news — in particular following non-earnings 8-K...

Jensen and Meckling (1976) claim that by facilitating monitoring of firms’ activities, security analysis by financial analysts can reduce agency costs between management and external capital providers, and thereby increase shareholder value. Additionally, boards are required to design...

This paper investigates the informativeness and value relevance of analyst target prices in the context of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Our results indicate that firms with high 12-month ahead target prices relative to current stock prices are more likely to become a takeover target and offer...

The performance of analysts’ forecasts has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, as yet, no empirical study has investigated the nexus between the analyst forecast dispersion (AFD) and excess returns surrounding stock market crashes in any depth. This paper attempts to fill...

This paper examines the relation between firm-level implied volatility skew and the likelihood of extreme negative events, or crash risk. I show that volatility skew identifies which firms are likely to experience crashes, but only in short-window earnings announcement periods. The predictive...

Measures of a firm's financial strength forecast stock returns. The relation between financial condition and future returns, however, is consistent with two explanations: (1) changes in investors' expectations are impounded gradually over time and, (2) riskier firms - with higher discount rates...

An earnings manipulation detection model based on forensic accounting principles (Beneish 1999) has substantial out-of-sample ability to predict cross-sectional returns. We show that the model correctly identified, ahead of time, 12 of the 17 highest profile fraud cases in the period 1998-2002....

This paper examines the impact of expectations manipulation on the usefulness of analyst forecasts in the residual income valuation model. Recognizing that firms may guide down analyst forecast to either truthfully communicate information (legitimate guidance) or mislead analysts to produce...

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...

This paper investigates the validity and usefulness of “hybrid” valuation models. We recast the model in Ohlson and Johannesson (2016) as a hybrid of the Dividend Discount Model and an earnings-based price multiple model, and develop a new hybrid model that generalizes the Residual Income...