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...

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 ...

one of the basic assumptions of management accounting illustrate that costschanges has a significance relationship with increasing and decreasing in the levelof activity, recently after being raised of sticky costs issue by anderson and hiscolleagues this assumption was discussed. it means increases in costs by increasingthe more activity level of reduction in costs is exchange for the reductio...

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...

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...

Time series models based upon the reported accounting data of Abbott Laboratories Inc. are used to forecast its one-year-ahead raw returns over hold-out periods of 1, 4 and 10 years. The sample data is annual, from 1955 to 2003. A general-to-specific, testing down, modelling method is used. The models suggest market values are corrected for imbalances between expected and actual market values i...

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...

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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 ...