While brokerage houses use both teams of sell-side analysts and individual analysts to conduct earnings research, there is no empirical research examining if teams and individuals differ with regard to their forecasting performance or purpose, and if so, how and why. We first examine the...

We examine the overall and individual analyst performance of 12-month-ahead target price forecasts over the 10-years, 2000-2009. Implied target price-based returns exceed actual returns by an average of 15%, and absolute target price forecast errors average 45%. At the end of the 12-month...

A growing number of studies use crowdsourced data to draw inferences regarding information relevance. To bolster research using crowdsourced data and to allow researchers to draw stronger inferences regarding information relevance, we examine the reliability of online biographies using earnings...

Little is known about which forecasts to select when all forecasts are not equally recent. This paper uses security analysts' annual earnings forecasts to examine this issue. The comparative predictive accuracy of the mean and three timely composites is examined, where the three timely...

Estimates of future quarterly earnings are of prime importance to capital market participants for formulating their investment decisions. Superior ability to forecast future earnings may enable investors to reap extraordinary returns by trading in the affected securities. The extant forecast...

We investigate the implications of recommendation-forecast consistency for the informativeness of stock recommendations and earnings forecasts and the quality of analysts’ earnings forecasts. Stock recommendations and earnings forecasts are often issued simultaneously and evaluated jointly by...

We consider forecast guidance as a mechanism that managers use to avoid negative earnings surprises. Modeling forecast guidance using methods by Matsumoto, [Accounting Review 77 (3) (2002) 483-514] and Bartov et al. [Journal of Accounting and Economics 33 (2) (2002) 173-204], we show that...

The state of the art in the analyst forecasting literature is that analyst earnings forecast ability is only firm-specific (Chen, Francis, and Jiang (2005); Chen and Jiang (2006)). This view is based on Park and Stice's (2000) finding of the absence of a “spillover” effect, i.e., investors...

We investigate firms' propensity to meet analysts' forecasts of cash flows and earnings, and identify factors pertaining to market valuation, financial analysts, and firms' financial condition to explain why firms sometimes meet cash flow forecasts but miss earnings forecasts. Firms meet cash...