The COVID-19 pandemic disrupts capital markets and confuses decision makers. This event represents an opportunity to better understand how financial analysts forecast earnings. We focus on forecasts for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in the United States, since REITs are relatively...

Range forecasts have evolved to be the most common form of management forecasts. Prior studies typically use the midpoint to evaluate analyst reaction to range forecasts, implicitly assuming that analysts place equal weights on the upper and the lower bounds of management range forecasts. We...

A vast literature has documented an optimistic bias of U.S. analysts. This study compares the optimistic bias of U.S. analysts to that of foreign analysts. Using the implied rate of return in target prices, i.e., the ratio of the target price to the stock price one day before the target price...