We test the implications of anchoring bias associated with forecast earnings per share (FEPS) for forecast errors, earnings surprises, stock returns, and stock splits. We find that analysts make optimistic (pessimistic) forecasts when a firm's FEPS is lower (higher) than the industry median....

We measure the information content of monthly analyst consensus forecasts for one-year-forward earnings per share (EPS) based on two well-established price discovery measures drawn from the area of market micro-structure research. Employing a 36-year sample of large US companies listed in the...

Unlike previous studies which have examined the role of financial analysts in developed economies, the aim of this paper is to investigate whether following the Tunisian stock market opening, both the analyst forecast accuracy and the market’s reliance on analyst forecasts, increase with time....

Portfolio recommendations should include, beyond an estimate of the expected return on the investment, also an assessment of the associated level of risk. This paper introduces a simple methodology to assign stock recommendations based on a firm valuation procedure that replaces the conventional...

The performance of analysts’ forecasts has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, as yet, no empirical study has investigated the nexus between the analyst forecast dispersion (AFD) and excess returns surrounding stock market crashes in any depth. This paper attempts to fill...

Analysts often update their recommendations following corporate news. Questions have been raised regarding analysts' ability to generate new information beyond recent corporate events. Employing a comprehensive database on corporate news we show that only a small minority of 27.9% of all...

We exploit a quasi-experiment to examine the effects of market makers and stock analysts in three emerging stock markets. We find substantial differences in the effects across markets and, in contrast to existing literature, the effects of market makers are not always positive. Our results...

Besides the positively biased rating structure and procyclical nature of analysts' stock recommendations we observe that within the global universe stock recommendations and stock performance are largely uncorrelated. Nevertheless, investors are able to benefit from sell side stock...

The arrival of new information helps financial markets to value assets, but it may has the side-effect of increasing their volatilities. A better knowledge of the mechanism that links relevant news and stock prices would help both private and institutional agents to improve the calibration of...

This paper shows that analyst recommendations aggregated at the country level predict international stock market returns. A trading strategy based on past country-level recommendations yields an abnormal return of around 0.9 percent per month. Aggregate analyst recommendations also predict...