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...

Analysts with above-median risk-adjusted performance in the estimation period persistently outperform those with below-median performance in the subsequent holdout period. The annualized risk-adjusted returns of trading strategies based on performance persistence are statistically and...

Empirical accounting research provides surprisingly little evidence on whether accounting earnings numbers capture cross-sectional differences in risk that are associated with cross-sectional differences in share prices. We address two questions regarding the risk-relevance of accounting...

We provide evidence that analysts' stock-price judgments depend on (1) the method of accounting for a business combination, and (2) the number of years that have elapsed since the business combination. Consistent with business-press reports of managers' concerns, analysts' stock-price judgments...

We investigate whether clear disclosure of comprehensive income (CI) facilitates detection of earnings management by buy-side financial analysts and predictably affects their security price judgments. Because analysts and investors often must sort through voluminous footnotes and non-financial...

Previous studies have shown that high short interest stocks have low subsequent returns. We test whether the persistence of this effect is due to costs limiting arbitrage. The arbitrage cost that we focus on is idiosyncratic risk which, regardless of the arbitrageur's level of diversification,...

We find that analysts who issue more accurate earnings forecasts also issue more profitable stock recommendations. The average factor-adjusted return associated with the recommendations of analysts in the highest accuracy quintile exceeds the corresponding return for analysts in the lowest...

The business media play an active role in influencing stock prices. Statistically significant excess returns at the time of the publication of stock recommendations have been documented many times. Frequently these abnormal gains begin to accumulate long before the publication date. In most...