By linking sell-side equity analysts to their deed records and LinkedIn profiles, I show that analysts with higher exposure to negative wealth shocks issue more pessimistic and less accurate forecasts. The effects are stronger when analysts have higher leverage in their homes and face career...

Using a method that avoids the need to specify earnings expectations (Ball and Shivakumar 2008), we demonstrate that the period surrounding the semi-annual announcement of Australian firms’ earnings is, on average, an important source of information. Although there is substantial year-to-year...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the predictability of earnings information before the quarterly disclosure date. Two categories of firms are contrasted: the firms that announce better quarterly earnings than the prior period and the firms that do not. The paper uses a sample of 67...

We create an alternative, simpler definition of analyst forecast timeliness leaders based on their response after the corporate quarterly earnings announcements, examining if these analysts’ forecasts are superior in informativeness and accuracy. Our Earnings Announcement Date Leader...

Researchers in accounting have recently provided evidence of a striking increase in the usefulness of earnings announcements based on stock market price and volume reactions (Beaver et al., 2018; Barron et al., 2018). Price reactions, however, are unable to capture investor disagreement and volume...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that sell recommendations are costlier than buy recommendations by carrying out cointegration analyses. We find that that analyst recommendations that plainly urge the investor to take action (buy, sell) are consistent with their estimated losses (gains)....

I propose to use volatility to infer opportunistic insider sales. I argue that insider sales occurring when volatility is low are suspicious and that these suspicious sales are likely to be driven by insiders’ private information for the following reasons. Suppose that insider sales are not...

This paper uses holdings and outage data from Robinhood and transaction-level data from U.S. exchanges to examine how retail investors affect the pricing of public earnings information. We find that retail trader activity is associated with prices that are more responsive to earnings surprises,...

Finance literature highlights various reasons for stock performance subsequent to earnings announcements. However, other moving parts in these scenarios must also be simultaneously specified. While both revenue and earnings surprises are important for determining stock performance,...

This paper examines the relation between voluntary disclosure of financial statement line items accompanying, and insider trading around, quarterly earnings announcements. We find that investors' reaction to positive earnings news is temporarily heightened by financial statement line items...

We use analyst earnings forecasts for banks to extract cost of capital measures. We find that the cost of equity and debt capital are decreasing in the Tier 1 ratio, whereas the total cost of capital is uncorrelated with the Tier 1 ratio. These findings suggest that investors adjust their...

For many years, the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) has been accepted as an anomaly to the efficient markets hypothesis. This drift subsequent to earnings announcements has been ascribed to the incomplete incorporation by the market of the information in these earnings announcements....

More companies are disclosing free cash flow in their earnings announcements. Companies choose a range of definitions for disclosed free cash flow, none of which correspond to the theoretical definition. The most common definition (in 38% of free cash flow disclosures) is operating cash flow...

We estimate the effect of information and ability spillovers on sell-side analysts' quarterly EPS forecast accuracy. Using a model that relates mean peer group ability along with the analyst's own ability to the analyst's forecast accuracy, we find that spillovers from peer analysts are large,...

This paper examines the association between insider trading before an earnings announcement and the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Consistent with insiders' private information being incorporated into prices through their trading, we find PEAD is significantly lower...

I/B/E/S is a common source of analyst earnings forecast data, and the reliability of these data is important for practice and academic research. Examining a common sample period, we compare annual earnings forecasts across two versions of the I/B/E/S detail file, one made available in 2009 and...

We propose that extrapolative beliefs about earnings announcement (EA) returns may contribute to our understanding of EA return patterns. We construct a theoretically-motivated measure of extrapolative investors' expectations based on a stock's recent history of EA returns. We then show that...

We introduce a new measure of stock misevaluation, 𝑄, which is consistent with the Gordon growth model for firm valuation. In our empirical application, we use 𝑄 to relate analyst forecasts to stock returns and measure the profitability of investment strategies that rely on information in...

Despite the increased frequency of analyst forecasts during earnings announcements, empirical evidence on the interaction between the information in the earnings announcement and these forecasts is limited. We examine the implications of reinforcing and contradicting analyst forecast revisions...

We show that the post earnings announcement drift (PEAD) is stronger for conglomerates thansingle-segment firms. Conglomerates, on average, are larger than single segment firms, so it isunlikely that limits-to-arbitrage drive the difference in PEAD. Rather, we hypothesize that marketparticipants...

This paper provides evidence that firms that have consistently met or beaten analysts' earnings expectations (MBE) provide more frequent “bad news” management forecasts than firms with no established string of MBE, particularly when existing analyst forecasts are optimistic. This suggests...

In this study, we examine negative skew premiums in the option equity markets around earnings announcements. Prior literature suggests stock returns are more negatively skewed on earnings dates but theoretical models suggest that anticipated price jumps should not carry a skew premium. We use...

Armed with a decade of social media data, I explore the impact of investor emotions on earnings announcements. In particular, I test whether the emotional content of firm-specific messages posted on social media just prior to a firm's earnings announcement predicts its earnings and announcement...

This study examines the implications of firm profitability, as a potential indication of audit-related risk, to audit quality, auditor reporting, auditor continuance decisions, and audit pricing in the post-SOX environment. Using a sample of non-financial public companies over the period 2005...

We provide new evidence on the role of management guidance in explaining earnings announcement-period returns. We show that guidance practices changed around the financial crisis in ways likely to affect the information content of guidance bundled with earnings. Managers provide guidance for a...

We apply state-of-the-art financial machine learning to assess the return-predictive value of more than 45,000 earnings announcements on a majority of S&P1500 constituents. To represent the diverse information content of earnings announcements, we generate predictor variables based on various...

We examine whether analysts' cash flow forecasts improve firm value. First, we analyze whether the joint issuance of financial analysts' earnings and cash flow forecasts improve firm value. Second, we analyze whether the quality of analysts' cash flow forecasts improve firm value. The empirical...

Approximately 90 percent of managers' earnings forecasts are issued simultaneously with their firm's current earnings announcement – a practice referred to as the “bundling” of earnings information. We examine whether managers bias these forecasts conditional on the news conveyed in...

Do insiders trade on private information about earnings? We address this question exploiting the discontinuity in the term structure of option prices around the announcement date, to obtain a daily and forward-looking measure of the informativeness of the next earnings announcement. This measure...

Previous research documents two puzzling findings that cast doubt on the usefulness of accounting information to investors: the declining power of street EPS in explaining earnings announcement returns and the increasing price reactions to earnings announcements. I show this evidence is due to...

Previous research documents two puzzling results that cast doubt on the usefulness of accounting information to investors: the declining power of street EPS in explaining earnings announcement returns and increasing price reactions to earnings announcements. I show this evidence is due to...

This paper examines whether 10K complexity has unintended consequences in terms of impairing price discovery in capital markets. More specifically, we examine the impact -- on market efficiency and information asymmetry -- of sell-side financial analysts' first revised forecasts following...

The SEC's EDGAR log files provide a direct, powerful measure of attention from relatively sophisticated investors. We apply this measure to a sample of earnings announcements from 2003 to 2016. We find that the stock market is less surprised, and the post-earnings-announcement drift is weaker...

We investigate the extent to which market participants use compensation payouts released in the DEF 14A proxy statement (DEF14A) to assess future firm performance by examining sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. Consistent with prior work, we confirm that CEO compensation unexplained by...

Stocks earn significantly negative abnormal returns before earnings announcements and positive after them. This "earnings announcement return cycle" (EARC) is unrelated to the earnings announcement premium, and it is a feature of stocks widely covered by analysts. Analysts' forecasts follow the...

We examine whether there is intra-industry information transfer with respect to the second moment of returns around earnings announcements. Using implied volatility from option prices to proxy for uncertainty about firm fundamentals, we find a significantly positive association between changes...

Post-earnings announcement drift is stronger in firms that release earnings on days when market returns are higher in magnitude. This drift remains robust after controlling for previously documented factors such as Friday releases, the number of simultaneous releases, and price delay measure....

Since 2001, the number of financial statement line items forecasted by analysts and managers that I/B/E/S and FactSet capture in their electronic data feeds has soared. Taking advantage of this rich new data, we find that 11 income statement and two cash flow statement analyst and management...

We analyze three different mechanical models to forecast earnings and compare their forecasts with those of analysts. Moreover, we evaluate implied cost of capital (ICC) estimates that are based on these forecasts. With our analyses we answer three open questions in the literature. 1) Do model...

This paper examines whether the duration of equity overvaluation influences managers' choice to use different earnings management mechanisms, and how corporate governance and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission's underlying earnings disclosure guidelines influence managers'...