Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public...

Both bond rating agencies and equity analysts evaluate public companies and report their findings and opinions to market participants. Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD) changed the dynamics of the market and placed restrictions on the information that companies could disclose to analysts. Debt...

The primary question addressed in this study is whether firm-specific ERCs - i.e., slope coefficients obtained from time-series regressions of abnormal returns on earnings surprises - are helpful in predicting price responses to future earnings surprises. Fundamental analysis involves both...

We examine the performance of buy-side analysts relative to that of the sell-side. Our tests show that buy-side analysts at a large investment firm make less optimistic stock recommendations than sell-side analysts, consistent with their facing fewer conflicts of interest. However, their...

This paper analyzes trade-initiation by small and large traders for one year following earnings announcements and examines the predictive ability of event-time trading for future returns. With earnings surprises based on a seasonal random walk expectations model, small traders react slightly...

We will assess how governance and incentive problems contributed to Enron's rise and fall. A well-functioning capital market creates appropriate linkages of information, incentives, and governance between managers and investors. This process is supposed to be carried out through a network of...

This paper looks at the distributional aspects of financial ratios drawn from a number of firms quoted on the Irish Stock exchange. It is shown that many of the fundamental assumptions that underlie traditional financial statement analysis are not present - a result that is frequently found in...

This paper analyzes the behavior of two groups of corporate earnings forecasters: analysts, who follow individual company fortunes, and strategists who predict earnings for various company aggregates. Using data for two market indices, the Samp;P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, we find...

This paper examines the career concerns of security analysts using long histories of their earnings forecasts, job separations and stock coverage assignments. Our findings include the following. Relatively good (accurate) past forecast performance increases the probability that an analyst moves...

In this paper we provide evidence on analyst activity and performance in 47 countries around the world, including several emerging market economies. Our empirical analysis first demonstrates wide variation in the extent and accuracy of analyst activity across our sample countries. A handful of...