An analysis of about 300000 earnings forecasts, created by 18000 individual forecasters for earnings of over 300 S&P listed firms, shows that these forecasts are predictable to a large extent using a statistical model that includes publicly available information. When we focus on the...

We study whether the financial analysts' concern to maintain friendly relationships with firms' managers in order to preserve their access to ‘soft' qualitative information entice them to issue pessimistic (“earnings surprise management” hypothesis) or optimistic (“management access”...

This paper studies whether independent research analysts issue more informative stock recommendation revisions than non-independent analysts. I find independent analyst recommendation upgrades and downgrades significantly less informative. I also investigate whether the identified differences in...

We examine the extent to which analysts who participate in earnings conference calls by asking questions possess superior private information relative to analysts who do not ask questions. Using a large sample of earnings conference call transcripts over the period 2002 to 2005, we find that...

We argue that financial analysts can be viewed as participants of two tournaments (the “All-star” tournament and the intrafirm tournament) and examine whether analysts are incentivized by the tournament compensation structure. Using data from 1991 to 2007, we find that interim losers are...

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 demonstrate that time stamps reported in I/B/E/S for analysts' recommendations released during trading hours are systematically delayed. Using newswire-reported time stamps, we find 30-minute returns of 1.83% (-2.10%) for upgrades (downgrades), but for this subset of recommendations we find...

We modify Morris and Shin (2002) to develop a structural model of analyst earnings forecasts. The model allows for analysts to herd due to informational effects and non-informational incentives. The benefits of our model are twofold: (1) we can decompose earnings forecasts into informational and...

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...

This paper studies the effect of competition on analysts' forecast informativeness. I show that the impact of competition on forecast informativeness is ambiguous in general, and identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which more intense competition can make forecasts less...