Prior analyst literature focuses on the impact of financial analysts on the firms they cover, and prior information-transfer literature concentrates on the externalities of information provided by management. This paper fills gaps in both streams of literature by examining the focal firm's...

Sell-side fundamental analyst reports are highly valued in the financial industry and include three main quantitative components: earnings forecasts, target prices, and buy/sell recommendations. An important question for investment managers is then, how accurate are the forecasts of fundamental...

Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

We investigate three potential channels of analyst value creation: improving fundamental performance through monitoring, reducing information asymmetry, and increasing investor recognition. We show that changes in investor recognition have consistent explanatory power for the market reaction to...

We explore a large sample of analysts’ estimates of the cost of equity capital (CoE) to evaluate their usefulness as expected return proxies (ERP). We find that the CoE estimates are significantly related to a firm’s beta, size, book-to-market ratio, leverage, and idiosyncratic volatility...

Putting an end to the “earnings game” requires that CEOs reclaim the initiative by avoiding earnings guidance and managing expectations in such a way that their stocks trade reasonably close to their intrinsic value. In place of earnings forecasts, management should provide information about...

We correlate analysts' forecast errors with temporal variation in investor sentiment. We find that when sentiment is high, analysts' forecasts of one-year-ahead earnings and long-term earnings growth are relatively more optimistic for “uncertain” or “difficult to value” firms. Adding...

This study compares the performance of sell-side equity analysts with and without a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. Using a large sample of forecasts, our tests indicate that CFA charterholders issue forecasts that are timelier than those of non-charterholders. The results for...

We use the recent disappearance of the accrual anomaly to investigate analysts' contribution to improved information processing by investors. Prior research finds that investors and analysts made accrual-related pricing and forecast errors, respectively, in the anomaly period. As sophisticated...

This paper examines abnormal stock returns around the publication of 1,167 reports issued by 26 brokerage firms on 37 small caps admitted to listing on the Italian stock market from 2003 to 2011. The focus is on small caps going public because, for such firms, information asymmetries may be...