We study whether financial analysts' concern for preserving good relationships with firms' managers motivates them to issue pessimistic or optimistic forecasts. Based on a dataset of one-yearahead EPS forecasts issued by 4 648 analysts concerning 241 French firms (1997-2007), we regress the analysts' forecast accuracy on its unintentional determinants. We then decompose the fixed effect of the regression and we use the firm-analyst pair effect as a measure of the intensity of the firm-analyst relationship. We find that a low (high) firm-analyst pair effect is associated with a low (high) forecast error. This observation suggests that pessimism and optimism result from the analysts' concern for cultivating their relationship with the firm's management
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More about this item
Keywords
financial analysts; earnings forecasts; soft information; panel regression;All these keywords.
JEL classification:
- C59 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Other
- D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations
- G17 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Financial Forecasting and Simulation
- G24 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Investment Banking; Venture Capital; Brokerage
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