Analysts publish earnings forecasts with serially correlated errors. We assess rational versus cognitive limitation explanations for analysts’ underreaction to earnings news. Institutional investor voting for all-star analyst selections reveals whether these investors prefer analysts to issue forecasts with less serially correlated errors. Consistent with it being potentially rational for analy...

We examine the relation between analysts’ earnings forecasts and firms’ intangible assets, including technology-based intangibles, brand names, and recognized intangibles. We predict that high information complexity of intangible assets increases the difficulty for analysts to assimilate information and increases analysts’ forecast error of intangibles-intensive firms. We find a positive associ...

This paper studies how the investors’ attitude towards earnings surprises affects the managers’ incentives to manipulate earnings in an intertemporal context, where the consensus forecast of the analysts is not exogenously given but determined by the strategic interaction between the analysts and the managers. Our analysis shows that given the asymmetric investors’ reaction to earnings surprise...

Using a sample of 2,085 voluntarily-provided “unbundled” management earnings forecasts in 1,372 unique press releases during the 1997-2006 period, we find significant incremental pricing effects for linguistic sentiment included in management forecast press releases. Our setting is distinct from those examined in prior linguistic studies in that forecasts are voluntarily issued, incentive-drive...

John Knopf, Michael Rebello, Dan Rogers, Steve Smith, and John Thorton. We have further benefited from the comments of the anonymous reviewers. We also gratefully acknowledge the contribution of I/B/E/S Inc. in providing earnings per share forecast data as part of a broad program to encourage research on earnings expectations. *Correspondence author, Department of Finance, J. Mack Robinson Coll...

Recent research suggests that optimistically biased earnings forecasts issued by analysts are attributable to analysts minimizing symmetric, linear loss functions. We test an alternative explanation, namely that analysts have asymmetric loss functions. Theory predicts that if loss functions are asymmetric then forecast error bias depends on forecast error variance, but not necessarily on skewne...