Prior research concludes that financial analysts do not process public information efficiently in generating their earnings forecasts. The OLS regression-based tests used in prior studies assume implicitly that analysts face a quadratic loss function, or that analysts minimize their squared...

We examine whether financial analysts fully incorporate expected inflation in their earnings forecasts for individual stocks. We find that expected inflation proxies, such as lagged inflation and inflation forecasts from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, predict the future earnings change of a...

Earnings announcement days on average provide more information to the stock market than any other days in each quarter. In particular, the proportions of the variation in annual returns explained by returns on days with dividend announcements, management forecasts, preannouncements, or 10-K and...

In a competitive information market, a single information source can only dominate other sources individually, not collectively. We explore whether earnings announcements constitute such a dominant source using Ball and Shivakumar's (2008) R2 metric: the proportion of the variation in annual...

Over the last decade, there has been much empirical research on Chinese accounting conservatism. This research started with Ball, Robin and Wu (2000) that was one of the first papers to apply modern research methods to Chinese data. In this paper, I survey the early research on conservatism to...

We examine whether access to management at broker-hosted investor conferences leads to more informative research by analysts. We find analyst recommendation changes have larger immediate price impacts when the analyst's firm has a conference-hosting relationship with the company. The effect...

Crowdsourcing — when a task normally performed by employees is outsourced to a large network of people via an open call — is making inroads into the investment research industry. We shed light on this new phenomenon by examining the value of crowdsourced earnings forecasts. Our sample...

We investigate to what extent the market uses information that is predictive of whether earnings will meet or beat the analyst consensus forecast of earnings (MBE henceforth): measures of a firm's incentives to engage in MBE behavior, measures of constraints on MBE, measures of past MBE...

Street earnings are non-GAAP earnings, adjusted for consistency with the analyst majority basis and disseminated by forecast data providers (FDPs). We find that the time it takes an FDP to incorporate street earnings in its products (activation delay, hereafter) reflects variation in the...

Debt research places greater importance on cash flow analysis and credit rating prediction than does equity research and is only available to equity analysts employed by the same broker. We show that equity analysts with access to high quality debt research issue cash flow forecasts for...