After the completion of an M&A transaction, the target firm is delisted but some analysts who covered it retain coverage of the merged firm. We hypothesize that this decision is based on two factors — the analyst's ability to cover the merged firm and his or her assessment of the M&A deal....

We study circumstances when analysts' forecasts diverge from managers' forecasts after management guidance, and the consequences of this divergence for investors and analysts. Our results show that investors' return response to earnings surprises based on analyst forecasts is significantly...