The business press generally reports news in quarterly earnings announcements based on the difference between actual earnings and two salient benchmarks: earnings of the same quarter in the previous year, and a consensus drawn from a distribution of forecasts by financial analysts. We evaluate...

When analysts issue both earnings and pre-tax income forecasts, they implicitly provide a forecast of income tax expense. We find that these pre-tax income forecasts have a negative (positive) effect on corporate tax avoidance for firms with relatively aggressive (non-aggressive) tax policy. We...

This paper examines whether analysts' pre-tax income forecasts mitigate the tax expense anomaly documented by Thomas and Zhang (J Account Res 49:791–821, 2011). They find that seasonal changes in quarterly income tax expense are positively related to future returns after controlling for the...

As a result of a 2003 SEC regulation intended to increase the transparency of firms' off-balance sheet obligations, tabular data on purchase obligations became available in the MD&A section of firms' 10-Ks. We develop a program to read the text of these disclosures and we create a database to...

Prior research finds that investors have difficulty pricing corporate innovation. This paper investigates the role of long-term growth forecasting financial analysts in the efficiency of stock prices and consensus sell-side analyst forecasts, with respect to information about firms' innovative...