Previous research finds that historical seasonal earnings rank negatively predicts stock returns surrounding earnings announcements (EAs) in China’s A-share markets. We examine whether management earnings forecasts (MEFs) help reduce the stock return seasonality associated with earnings...

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...

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...

This paper examines the relation between firm-level implied volatility skew and the likelihood of extreme negative events, or crash risk. I show that volatility skew identifies which firms are likely to experience crashes, but only in short-window earnings announcement periods. The predictive...

Measures of a firm's financial strength forecast stock returns. The relation between financial condition and future returns, however, is consistent with two explanations: (1) changes in investors' expectations are impounded gradually over time and, (2) riskier firms - with higher discount rates...

In recent studies, the analysts' consensus forecasts are widely used as a proxy for the unobservable market's consensus expectation of future earnings. As prior studies indicate, the analysts' consensus forecasts measure the true underlying construct with errors and the errors may vary...

An earnings manipulation detection model based on forensic accounting principles (Beneish 1999) has substantial out-of-sample ability to predict cross-sectional returns. We show that the model correctly identified, ahead of time, 12 of the 17 highest profile fraud cases in the period 1998-2002....

For a sample of commercial banks during 1994 – 2008, we find that accumulated fair value adjustments for interest-bearing investment securities are positively associated with future interest income and total realized income from these investments. Additional tests reveal that accumulated fair...

This paper examines the impact of expectations manipulation on the usefulness of analyst forecasts in the residual income valuation model. Recognizing that firms may guide down analyst forecast to either truthfully communicate information (legitimate guidance) or mislead analysts to produce...

We extend prior research examining the relation between aggregate recommendation changes and future returns by documenting that this relation varies over time as a function of the predictability of future earnings growth. When industry-level earnings growth is more predictable, we find that...