Analysts’ earnings forecasts are not perfectly correlated with actual earnings. One statistical consequence is that the most optimistic and most pessimistic forecasts are usually too optimistic and too pessimistic. The forecasts’ accuracy can be improved by shrinking them toward the mean. Insufficient appreciation of this statistical principle may partly explain the success of contrarian invest...

This paper uses high frequency data to evaluate whether information asymmetry in the market is reduced as a result of corporate earnings and dividend announcements. Changes in the level of information asymmetry due to the announcements are proxied by the rate of change in trading volume, bid-ask spread, cumulative abnormal returns, and order imbalance. Our results show support for an informatio...

This paper is about income and poverty dynamics and their socioeconomic correlates. The first half of the paper aims to establish some of the salient facts for Britain, applying the pioneering methods of Bane and Ellwood (1986). Important for poverty dynamics are changes in labour earnings from persons other than the household head, changes in non-labour income (including benefits), and changes...

We develop a stock return-predictive measure based on an efficient aggregation of the portfolio holdings of all actively managed U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, and use this model to study the source of fund managers’ stock-selection abilities. This “generalized-inverse alpha” (GIA) approach reveals differences in the ability of managers to predict firms’ future earnings from fundamental res...

This paper provides evidence that analysts who made a sequence of accurate predictions of earnings relative to the median forecast tend to be relatively more inaccurate and more out of consensus in their subsequent earnings prediction. This phenomenon is economically and statistically meaningful. The results are robust to different estimation techniques and different control variables. Our find...

Prior literature generally finds analysts are able to identify and process complex financial information. However, research suggests that in certain settings, struggle fully incorporate into their forecasts all available We examine analysts' forecast properties the face of a specific type information: real earnings management (REM). First, we investigate relation between measures REM properties...

We consider the sources of forecast errors and their consequences in an evolving economy subject to structural breaks,forecasting from mis-specified, data-based models. A model-free taxonomy of forecast errors highlights that deterministic shifts are a major cause of systematic forecast failure. Other sources seem to pose fewer problems. The taxonomy embeds several previous model-based taxonomi...

This paper investigates the role of management earnings forecasts in mitigating information asymmetry between investors and managers relating to moral hazard, and explains how earnings guidance can facilitate monitoring. I demonstrate that firms that are more susceptible to moral hazard problems and more difficult to monitor are also more likely to issue annual earnings forecasts and they do so...

Received: 15 July 2008 Revised: 8 January 2010 Accepted: 12 February 2010 Online publication date: 24 June 2010 Abstract The international business (IB) literature has widely recognized political forces as major factors that complicate the strategic decisions of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Analyses by financial intermediaries can help to reduce the risk of information asymmetry caused by ...

In this study, we employ an innovative new methodology suggested by Bernhardt et al. (2006) to examine the herding (or anti-herding) behavior of German analysts in case of earnings forecasts. Our methodology avoids well-known shortcomings often encountered in related studies, such as, e.g., correlated information signals, unexpected common shocks to earnings, systematic optimism or pessimism or...