This paper analyses the investment value of analysts' consensus recommendations and their changes in eight developed stock markets using equity recommendations from Factset/JCF database, in the period from January 1994 to June 2004. Our results show that analysts are optimistically biased,...

"The financial literature has shown that both earnings forecasts and investment recommendations are optimistically biased. However, while the bias in earnings forecasts has decreased over time and even some recent studies show that they are no longer optimistic, in the case of investment...

Several studies have analyzed discretionary accruals to address earnings-smoothing behaviors in the banking industry. We argue that the characteristic link between accruals and earnings may be nonlinear, since both the incentives to manipulate income and the practical way to do so depend...

Several studies have characterized the relation between discretionary accruals and earnings before-taxes to test for the existence of earnings smoothing behaviors. In this paper, we argue that the characteristic response of accruals to earnings is not linear, as the literature has shown....

This paper analyzes whether the excessive overreliance on non-interest income and wholesale funding, which occurred in the banking industry during the last two decades and led to increases in systemic risk, could arise from the desire of bank managers to increase their variable compensation....

We analyse the effect of splits on stock liquidity. The results show a drop in trading volume and depth and an increase in the relative bid-ask spread. We detect a change in trading composition, with an increase in the smallest transactions, mainly on the buyer side of shares whose prices fall...

Previous evidence has documented that equity issuers underperform in the long-run. One possible explanation is that investors have over-optimistic expectations regarding future earnings and the underperformance occurs as these expectations are corrected over time. Our central focus is to test...

This study uses a sample of Spanish companies to examine the use of stock split announcements as signals of a firm's earnings performance. Our results confirm that, as in other stock markets, investors in the Spanish market upwardly revise share prices and financial analysts improve their...