We examine whether, and to what extent, investors focus on salient and easy-to-process features in responding to analyst forecasts. We focus on rounding as arguably the most salient forecast feature. We find that while rounding is only marginally associated with forecast accuracy, investors...

We examine three related issues on the impact of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) on financial markets. First, we hypothesize and find that analysts are more pessimistic in the fall season, as indicated by their earnings forecasts and forecast revisions. Second, we show that equity returns fail...

Contrary to the common perception that operating cash flows are better than accounting earnings at explaining equity valuations, recent studies suggest that valuations derived from industry multiples based on reported earnings are closer to traded prices than those based on reported operating...

This paper investigates the conclusion in Diether, Malloy, and Scherbina (2002) that dispersion in analysts' forecasts proxies for differences in investor beliefs, and that prices reflect the beliefs of optimistic investors when dispersion is high. If this is the case, we expect to find higher...

The purpose of this paper is to determine how to produce best estimates of intrinsic value, as measured by 36 month abnormal returns, using IBES only forecasts, VL only forecasts, or forecasts from both services. IBES only provides earnings forecasts, while VL provides forecasts of earnings,...

We investigate analysts' motives for rounding annual EPS forecasts (placing a zero or five in the penny location of the forecast). We first show that an intuitive reason for analysts to engage in rounding is in circumstances where the penny location of the forecast is of less economic...

Miller (1977) hypothesizes that differences of opinion among investors about stock value result in overvaluation so long as some investors are short-sales constrained. Prior evidence on the role of differences of opinion for stock prices has not yielded convincing evidence. We test the Miller...

Both academic and practicing accountants use forecasts made by security analysts to estimate market expectations about forthcoming earnings announcements. We report empirical analysis to illustrate how common stock splits induce a loss of precision in computing forecast errors from commonly used...

We investigate whether the direction and magnitude of earnings management by a firm is affected by analysts' current perception of its equity investment potential (i.e., its perceived ability to generate positive abnormal returns). We argue that firms whose investment potential is perceived to...

We examine whether the two distinct post-earnings-announcement drifts associated with seasonal random walk-based and analyst-based earnings surprises are attributable to the trading activities of distinct sets of investors. We predict and find that small (large) traders continue to trade in the...