No abstract

We posit and find an effect of disclosure and analyst reporting regulations implemented from 2000 through 2003 (including Regulation Fair Disclosure, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Global Settlement Act) on the importance of analyst and forecast characteristics for analyst forecast accuracy. Following the enactment of these regulations, more experienced analysts and All-Star analysts do not maintain their superior forecast accuracy, and analysts employed by large brokerage houses perform worse than other analysts. In addition, we find a decrease in the importance of analyst effort, the number of industries and firms followed, days elapsed since the last forecast, and forecast horizon. While the importance of bold upward forecast revisions does not change, bold downward revisions lose their relevance for forecast accuracy after 2003. Finally, we find an increase in the importance of prior forecast accuracy. We find that the importance of these characteristics varies with the precision of publicly available information. Specifically, the decrease in the importance of most analyst and forecast characteristics and the increase in the importance of prior forecast accuracy are greater when the precision of publicly available information is low. Overall, our results suggest that the positive effects of experience, effort, brokerage house size and All-Star status on forecast accuracy in the pre-regulation period were because of the information advantages that these analysts enjoyed (rather than their ability to generate private information). In contrast, our results suggest that prior forecast accuracy is related to analysts' ability to generate private information.

This article investigates the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty, and the impact of monetary policy on this relationship using monthly Turkish inflation data over January 1984 to-October 2005. The results from various types of GARCH-M models indicate that higher inflation rates lead to greater inflation uncertainty. On the other hand, the effect of inflation uncertainty on inflation is found to be negative due to stabilization motives' dominating the opportunistic incentives of monetary authorities. We find strong evidence to support the view that inflation-oriented monetary policy has power to reduce the inflation persistence and eliminate uncertainty.

Prior studies find that analysts tend to bias their forecasts upward in poor information environments and downward in rich information environments, consistent with attempts to curry favor with management. We find that investors anticipate this behavior by reducing their response to upward forecasts in poor information environments and downward forecasts in rich information environments. Using Hugon and Muslu’s measure of analyst conservatism as an ex ante indicator of individual analysts’ forecast bias tendencies, we show that the stronger return response they find to conservative analysts’ forecast revisions is restricted to poor information environments, where optimistic analyst bias is prevalent. Our results suggest that analysts pay a price in market influence when their forecasts reinforce analysts’ typical forecast bias for the firm’s information environment. Conversely, analysts whose forecasts conflict with the typical bias for the firm are rewarded with larger than average return responses.

Berkman, Dimitrov, Jain, Koch, and Tice (2009) document a negative relationship between differences of opinion and earnings announcement returns, and this relationship is more pronounced when short‐sale constraints are likely to be high. These findings are interpreted as support for the theory in Miller (1977) that binding short sale constraints cause pessimists to be underrepresented in price formation. We conjecture that accounting information (i.e., earnings news) is likely to play a role in this returns pattern. After controlling for the level of earnings news, we find that the relationship between differences of opinion and stock returns is either eliminated or opposite from what is predicted by Miller's theory. Further, we present evidence that suggests the confounding effect of earnings news can be explained by (pessimistic) management earnings guidance. Our findings offer an alternative explanation for why low differences of opinion stocks earn greater abnormal returns around earnings announcements.