Analyst Characteristics, Timing of Forecast Revisions, and Analyst Forecasting Ability

Management Earnings Forecasts and Value of Analyst Forecast Revisions

Prior studies evaluate the relative importance of the sources of value that financial analysts bring to the market based on the price impact of forecast revisions over the event time. We find that management earnings forecasts influence the timing and precision of analyst forecasts. More importantly, evidence suggests that prior studies’ finding of weaker (stronger) stock-price responses to for...

Information Uncertainty and Analyst Forecast Behavior*

Prior literature observes that information uncertainty exacerbates investor underreaction behavior. In this paper, I investigate whether, as professional investment intermediaries, sellside analysts suffer more behavioral biases in cases of greater information uncertainty. I show that greater information uncertainty predicts more positive (negative) forecast errors and subsequent forecast revis...

Analyst Forecast Dispersion and Aggregate Stock Returns

This paper shows a positive relation between analyst forecast dispersion and future aggregate stock returns, significant and robust. The innovations in forecast dispersions are negatively associated with contemporaneous aggregate returns and changes in discount rates. Decomposing forecast dispersion into “uncertainty” and “information asymmetry” components, I find that the “uncertainty” compone...

Investor learning about analyst predictive ability

Bayesian learning implies decreasing weights on prior beliefs and increasing weights on the accuracy of the analyst’s past forecast record, as the number of forecast errors comprising her forecast record (its length) increases. Consistent with this model of investor learning, empirical tests show that investors’ reactions to forecast news are increasing in the product of the accuracy and length...

Organizational Structure , Tax Havens , Analyst Forecast Properties and Information Environment