IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-06g10031.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Can earnings forecasts be improved by taking into account the forecast bias?

Author

Listed:
  • Sandrine LARDIC

    (Sinopia AM and EconomiX)

  • Karine MICHALON

    (EconomiX)

  • François DOSSOU

    (Sinopia AM)

Abstract

The recent period has highlighted a well-known phenomenon, namely the existence of a positive bias in experts' anticipations. Literature on this subject underlines optimism in the financial analyst community. In this work, our significant contributions are twofold: we provide explanatory bias prediction models which will subsequently allow the calculation of earnings adjusted forecasts, for horizons from 1 to 24 months. We explain the bias using macroeconomic as well as sector and firm specific variables. We obtain some important results. In particular, the macroeconomic variables are statistically significant and their signs are coherent with the intuition. However, we conclude that the microeconomic variables are the main explanatory variables. From the forecast evaluation statistics viewpoints, the adjusted forecasts make it possible quasi-systematically to improve the forecasts of the analysts.

Suggested Citation

  • Sandrine LARDIC & Karine MICHALON & François DOSSOU, 2008. "Can earnings forecasts be improved by taking into account the forecast bias?," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 7(11), pages 1-20.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-06g10031
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/EB/2008/Volume7/EB-06G10031A.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brown, Lawrence D., 1993. "Earnings forecasting research: its implications for capital markets research," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 295-320, November.
    2. Terence Lim, 2001. "Rationality and Analysts' Forecast Bias," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(1), pages 369-385, February.
    3. Stanimir Markov & Ane Tamayo, 2006. "Predictability in Financial Analyst Forecast Errors: Learning or Irrationality?," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(4), pages 725-761, September.
    4. Amitabh Dugar & Siva Nathan, 1995. "The Effect of Investment Banking Relationships on Financial Analysts' Earnings Forecasts and Investment Recommendations," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 12(1), pages 131-160, September.
    5. Brown, Lawrence D., 1993. "Reply to commentaries on "Earnings forecasting research: its implications for capital markets research"," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 343-344, November.
    6. John Capstaff & Krishna Paudyal & William Rees, 2001. "A Comparative Analysis of Earnings Forecasts in Europe," Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(5‐6), pages 531-562, June.
    7. Werner F. M. De Bondt & William P. Forbes*, 1999. "Herding in analyst earnings forecasts: evidence from the United Kingdom," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 5(2), pages 143-163, July.
    8. John Capstaff & Krishna Paudyal & William Rees, 1999. "The relative forecast accuracy of UK brokers," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(1), pages 3-16.
    9. Abarbanell, Jeffery S., 1991. "Do analysts' earnings forecasts incorporate information in prior stock price changes?," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2), pages 147-165, June.
    10. Tarun Chordia & Lakshmanan Shivakumar, 2005. "Inflation Illusion and Post‐Earnings‐Announcement Drift," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(4), pages 521-556, September.
    11. Brous, Peter A. & Kini, Omesh, 1993. "A reexamination of analysts' earnings forecasts for takeover targets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 201-225, April.
    12. Wansbeek, Tom & Kapteyn, Arie, 1989. "Estimation of the error-components model with incomplete panels," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 341-361, July.
    13. Richard D. F. Harris, 1999. "The Accuracy, Bias and Efficiency of Analysts’ Long Run Earnings Growth Forecasts," Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(5‐6), pages 725-755, June.
    14. Lys, Thomas & Sohn, Sungkyu, 1990. "The association between revisions of financial analysts' earnings forecasts and security-price changes," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(4), pages 341-363, December.
    15. Collins, Wa & Hopwood, Ws, 1980. "A Multivariate-Analysis Of Annual Earnings Forecasts Generated From Quarterly Forecasts Of Financial Analysts And Univariate Time-Series Models," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(2), pages 390-406.
    16. Dechow, Patricia M. & Sloan, Richard G., 1997. "Returns to contrarian investment strategies: Tests of naive expectations hypotheses," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 3-27, January.
    17. Brown, Philip, 1993. "Comments on 'Earnings forecasting research: its implications for capital markets research' by L. Brown," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 331-335, November.
    18. John Capstaff & Krishna Paudyal & William Rees, 2001. "A Comparative Analysis of Earnings Forecasts in Europe," Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(5‐6), pages 531-562, June.
    19. Brown, Lawrence D. & Hagerman, Robert L. & Griffin, Paul A. & Zmijewski, Mark E., 1987. "Security analyst superiority relative to univariate time-series models in forecasting quarterly earnings," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 61-87, April.
    20. Rajan, Raghuram & Servaes, Henri, 1997. "Analyst Following of Initial Public Offerings," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(2), pages 507-529, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:ebl:ecbull:v:7:y:2008:i:11:p:1-20 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Karine Michalon & Sandrine Lardic & François Dossou, 2005. "Earnings forecast bias - a statistical analysis," Post-Print halshs-00142773, HAL.
    3. Clatworthy, Mark A. & Peel, David A. & Pope, Peter F., 2007. "Evaluating the properties of analysts’ forecasts: A bootstrap approach," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 3-13.
    4. Kothari, S. P., 2001. "Capital markets research in accounting," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(1-3), pages 105-231, September.
    5. Anna M. Cianci & Satoris S. Culbertson, 2010. "The Impact of Motivational and Cognitive Factors on Optimistic Earnings Forecasts," Chapters, in: Brian Bruce (ed.), Handbook of Behavioral Finance, chapter 11, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    6. Brown, Philip & Clarke, Alex & How, Janice C. Y. & Lim, Kadir J. P., 2002. "Analysts' dividend forecasts," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 371-391, September.
    7. Higgins, Huong, 2013. "Can securities analysts forecast intangible firms’ earnings?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 155-174.
    8. Brown, Lawrence D. & Zhou, Ling, 2015. "Interactions between analysts’ and managers’ earnings forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 501-514.
    9. Beyer, Anne & Cohen, Daniel A. & Lys, Thomas Z. & Walther, Beverly R., 2010. "The financial reporting environment: Review of the recent literature," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(2-3), pages 296-343, December.
    10. Iris Bergmann & Wolfgang Schultze, 2018. "Accounting based valuation: a simultaneous equations model for forecasting earnings to proxy for ‘other information’," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 50(4), pages 1057-1091, May.
    11. Ramnath, Sundaresh & Rock, Steve & Shane, Philip, 2008. "The financial analyst forecasting literature: A taxonomy with suggestions for further research," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 34-75.
    12. Ruei-Shian Wu & Hsiou-wei W. Lin, 2014. "Security analysts' incentive and cognitive processing bias: evidence from analysts' recommendations," Asia-Pacific Journal of Accounting & Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(4), pages 443-471, December.
    13. S. P. Kothari & Charles Wasley, 2019. "Commemorating the 50‐Year Anniversary of Ball and Brown (1968): The Evolution of Capital Market Research over the Past 50 Years," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 57(5), pages 1117-1159, December.
    14. So, Eric C., 2013. "A new approach to predicting analyst forecast errors: Do investors overweight analyst forecasts?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(3), pages 615-640.
    15. García-Meca, Emma & Sánchez-Ballesta, Juan Pedro, 2006. "Influences on financial analyst forecast errors: A meta-analysis," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 15(1), pages 29-52, February.
    16. Rees, Lynn & Sharp, Nathan Y. & Wong, Paul A., 2017. "Working on the weekend: Do analysts strategically time the release of their recommendation revisions?," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 104-121.
    17. Ramnath, Sundaresh & Rock, Steve & Shane, Philip, 2005. "Value Line and I/B/E/S earnings forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 185-198.
    18. Jung, Jay Heon & Pae, Jinhan & Yoo, Choong-Yuel, 2015. "Do analysts treat winners and losers differently when forecasting earnings?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 531-549.
    19. Echterling, F. & Eierle, B. & Ketterer, S., 2015. "A review of the literature on methods of computing the implied cost of capital," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 235-252.
    20. Xiaomeng Chen, 2010. "Australian evidence on the accuracy of analysts' expectations," Accounting Research Journal, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 23(1), pages 94-116, July.
    21. Gu, Zhaoyang & Wu, Joanna Shuang, 2003. "Earnings skewness and analyst forecast bias," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 5-29, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Analysts Forecasts;

    JEL classification:

    • G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-06g10031. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.