Using unique new data, we examine whether brokerage trading volume creates a conflict of interest for analysts' earnings forecasts. We find that forecast optimism is associated with higher brokerage volume, even controlling for forecast and analyst quality, recommendations, and target prices....

Using an extensive database of 356,463 sell-side equity analysts' reports from 2002 to 2009, this study is one of the first to analyze the readability of analysts' reports. We first examine the determinants of variations in analyst report readability. Using several proxies for ability, we show...

We examine how the sudden drop in public information search capability caused by Google’s withdrawal from China affects Chinese analysts’ earnings forecasts. We observe, after Google’s withdrawal, a decline in analysts’ forecast accuracy for firms with foreign trade relative to those...

This paper is the first to investigate the role of work-life balance in financial analysts’ performance and career advancement. Using a large sample of Glassdoor reviews by financial analysts, we find a significant non-linear relation between work-life balance and analyst performance and...

We investigate whether the adoption of IFRS in 2005 by Australian firms has been associated with a loss of potentially useful information about intangible assets, as conjectured by Matolcsy and Wyatt (2006). We find that the negative association between analyst forecast error...

Recent literature suggests that other information included with management earnings forecasts may not be useful to the market as a direct disclosure. I use regression analysis to investigate whether this type of disclosure can help analysts to formulate more accurate forecasts of earnings....

This paper assesses the performance of securities analysts in forecasting the future earnings of intangible firms. The assessment is relative to extrapolative time-series models of earnings forecasts. The paper's results show that the forecast errors produced by both analysts and extrapolative...

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of beating analysts' forecasts and the impact of analysts' forecast dispersion on the pricing of firms' credit default swaps (CDSs). CDS premium is the compensation required by investors for bearing firms' credit default risk. Sell-side analysts...

Sell-side analysts have been the subject of hundreds of academic studies. In this paper, I offer perspectives on the state of our understanding of analysts based on prior academic research. Additionally, several observations are offered, which question how descriptive certain widely held beliefs...

We examine the sophistication of analysts' cash flow forecasts to better understand what accrual adjustments, if any, analysts make when forecasting cash flows. As a preliminary step, we first demonstrate that prior empirical tests used to evaluate the sophistication of analysts' cash flow...