This paper reveals that in addition to fundamental factors, the 52-week high price and recent investor sentiment play an important role in analysts' target price formation. Analysts' forecasts of short-term earnings and long-term earnings growth are shown to be important explanatory variables...

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...

We investigate whether analysts' common-stock valuation judgments are predictably affected by (1) different methods of accounting for business combinations and (2) the number of years that elapse after the business combinations occur. Numerous articles in the business press suggest that...

We examine in this study the relevance to investors of information on the capitalization of software development costs, as promulgated in 1985 by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in its Statement No. 86 (SFAS 86). We find that software capitalization is value-relevant to investors: The...

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...