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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Fu, Kraft and Zhang (2012) use a hand-collected sample of firms with different interim reporting frequencies from 1951 to 1973 to test whether higher reporting frequency is associated with lower information asymmetry and a lower cost of equity capital. Their results suggest that firms with...

Using hand-collected data on firms' interim reporting frequency from 1951 to 1973, we examine the impact of financial reporting frequency on information asymmetry and the cost of equity. Our results show that higher reporting frequency reduces information asymmetry and the cost of equity, and...

We examine analysts' GAAP earnings forecasts and illustrate their usefulness in two prominent research settings. First, we find that the availability of GAAP forecasts has increased dramatically since 2003, and they are now available for most I/B/E/S-covered firms. Next, we utilize GAAP...

This paper extends the study of Herrmann and Thomas (2005) on granularity in analyst forecasts at multiples of nickels and finds that forecasts at multiples of nickels are more optimistic, and induce weaker market responses. Granularity in analyst forecasts combined with managers’ incentive to...