This paper reports the results of an experiment that examines how analyst forecast accuracy (i.e., how close an analyst's forecast is to realized earnings) and forecast boldness (i.e. how far the analyst's forecast is from the consensus forecast) affect the analyst's perceived credibility and...

We examine changes in analysts' monitoring incentives and effectiveness as they progress along their career paths. We find that analysts are less likely to be elected all-stars in the annual Institutional Investor elections when the firms they covered in the year prior to the election have high...

This paper examines the performance consequences of cutting discretionary expenditures and managing accruals to exceed analyst forecasts. We show that firms that just beat analyst forecasts with low quality earnings exhibit a short-term stock price benefit relative to firms that miss forecasts...

This paper examines the impact of teamwork on sell-side analysts' performance. Using a hand-collected sample of over 50,000 analyst research reports, we find that analyst teams issue more than 70% of annual earnings forecasts. In contrast, most prior research implicitly assumes that forecasts...

We examine how product market threats influence the precision of financial analyst forecasts. Greater competitive threats may make forecasting more difficult by increasing the uncertainty regarding future cash flows and by influencing the quality of financial disclosure. Using a firm-specific...

In this paper, we examine 12,954 equity research reports for 24 firms that are subject to enforcement actions by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). We search the text of the equity research reports for a number of...

Corporate tax avoidance is likely to be associated with a high level of earnings management and with high financial opacity in the time-series. On this basis, we hypothesize that analyst coverage is negatively associated with corporate tax avoidance. Our results confirm this conjecture, and are...

We examine the performance of acquirers who hire an advisor that employs a “star” analyst covering the target (i.e., “star-crossed” deals) and show that such deals have lower abnormal announcement returns (2.1%), lower total acquisition returns (8.9%), and greater subsequent goodwill...

We study the relation between audit committee accounting expertise, analyst following, and market liquidity. Our main results indicate that analyst following increases subsequent to the appointment of an accounting expert to the audit committee. We also provide evidence that accrual quality, as...

The vast majority of reports written by sell-side equity analysts conclude with a reiteration of the analyst's existing recommendation on a firm's stock. Yet there is a disproportionate amount of research that focuses on the market reactions of changes in recommendations and a prevailing sense...