While Wall Street closely watches financial analysts’ earnings forecasts, Main Street often scrutinizes product quality relative to competition. Do firms with superior product competitiveness enjoy greater likelihood of beating analyst earnings target? And if so, is there contingency in this impact? We show that positive changes in product competitiveness contribute to the firm’s likelihood of ...

We investigate the association between errors in management forecasts of subsequent year earnings and current year accruals. In an uncertain operating environment, managers’ assessments of their firms’ business prospects are imperfect. Since managers’ imperfect business assessments influence both accruals generation and earnings projection, we hypothesize that management earnings forecasts exhi...

I develop a model in which analysts strategically time and exaggerate their forecasts to convince the public that they are skilled. The model’s key predictions are that an analyst will tend to forecast later if he has a better ex ante reputation, and he will tend to forecast earlier if the quality of public information is lower. Using a database of individual analysts’ earnings forecasts, I emp...

The objective of this paper is to present and discuss the results of a link mining algorithm called CorpInterlock that integrates the metrics of an extended corporate interlock (social network of directors and financial analysts) with corporate fundamental variables and analysts’ predictions (consensus) in order to forecast the trend of the cumulative abnormal return and earnings surprise using...

In this paper, we re-examine the widely-held belief that analysts’ earnings per share (EPS) forecasts are superior to forecasts from a time-series model. Using a naive random walk time-series model for annual earnings, we investigate whether and when analysts’ annual forecasts are superior. We also examine whether analysts’ forecasts approximate market expectations better than expectations from...

Long historical averages of real earnings help forecast present values of future real dividends. With aggregate U.S. stock market data (1871-1986), a vector-autoregressive forecast of the present value of future dividends is, for each year, roughly a weighted average of moving-average arnings and current real price, with between two thirds and three fourths of the weight on the earnings measure...

Managers face a number of incentives to report earnings that meet or exceed the consensus analyst forecast. If a firm’s results of operations are not sufficient to meet the analysts’ expectations for a given period, the manager may 1) use accrual based earnings management techniques or 2) structure actual transactions to achieve the desired financial reporting result. Additionally, the manager ...