Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Controlling, grade: 1,3, University of Cologne (Seminar für allgemeine BWL und Controlling), language: English, abstract: Since the beginning of the 90s research on issues referring to analysts’ practise grew rapidly to such an extent that even several publications are concerned with giving an overview of this development. Besides the principal-agent problematic between the firm’s managers and the equity investors, investors are dependent on analysts’ information in times where equity trading soared and the trading turnover in 2008 was 35 times higher than in 1980. That is why shareholders are not able to analyse the amount of information regarding a company due to lack of time or ability. Therefore analysts advise investors to make a profitable decision by publishing a report including for instance stock recommendations or earnings forecasts. Another reason why there is so much research about analysts’ practise is the fact that their information influences investors’ trading behaviour. Thus, it is crucial to know how reliable those statements are and accordingly to be able to assess the quality of the outputs. However, to answer the question of analysts’ process of transforming various information of stock recommendations have to be examined in detail. Recent investigations rather focus on the single properties of analysts’ analyses as earnings forecasts and stock recommendations, but did not connect those two values. Prior studies deal with research questions like the effect of earnings forecasts on the stock prices or the use of stock recommendations to foretell abnormal return. Bradshaw (2004) is the first research paper which follows the question whether there is a link and if so how analysts incorporate the earnings forecasts into their stock recommendation. Because of the importance of Bradshaw (2004), this paper reviews the main issues and embeds them into the existing literature concerning the role of analysts. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The first chapter focuses on the character of analysts and potential key input factors which might be used by analysts for issuing recommendations. Then a brief review of Bradshaw (2004) is given to present the main results. This enables a discussion about potential and realized extensions in literature which follows in the third chapter. The final chapter concludes.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Controlling, grade: 1,3, University of Cologne (Seminar fur allgemeine BWL und Controlling), language: English, abstract: Since the beginning of the 90s research on issues referring to analysts' practise grew rapidly to such an extent that even several publications are concerned with giving an overview of this development. Besides the principal-agent problematic between the firm's managers and the equity investors, investors are dependent on analysts' information in times where equity trading soared and the trading turnover in 2008 was 35 times higher than in 1980. That is why shareholders are not able to analyse the amount of information regarding a company due to lack of time or ability. Therefore analysts advise investors to make a profitable decision by publishing a report including for instance stock recommendations or earnings forecasts. Another reason why there is so much research about analysts' practise is the fact that their information influences investors' trading behaviour. Thus, it is crucial to know how reliable those statements are and accordingly to be able to assess the quality of the outputs. However, to answer the question of analysts' process of transforming various information of stock recommendations have to be examined in detail. Recent investigations rather focus on the single properties of analysts' analyses as earnings forecasts and stock recommendations, but did not connect those two values. Prior studies deal with research questions like the effect of earnings forecasts on the stock prices or the use of stock recommendations to foretell abnormal return. Bradshaw (2004) is the first research paper which follows the question whether there is a link and if so how analysts incorporate the earnings forecasts into their stock recommendation. Because of the importance of Bradshaw (2004), this paper reviews the main issues and embeds them into the existing literature concerni

Sell-side analysts summarize their opinions about stocks with earnings forecasts and stock recommendations. Because earnings forecasts reflect future fundamentals, and future fundamentals determine value, forecasts and recommendations should be related. In this paper, I test for evidence of such a relation. Using analysts' earnings forecasts in conjunction with the residual income valuation model, I generate intrinsic value estimates for a comprehensive range of plausible calibrations of the model parameters. I find that analysts' stock recommendations are generally unrelated to the deviation of intrinsic value estimates from trading prices. Extending this analysis to consider value estimates generated by a valuation heuristic documented in prior research, I find the heuristic valuations to be strongly related to analysts' stock recommendations. Taken together, the evidence suggests that analysts incorporate their earnings forecasts into their recommendations in a manner consistent with earnings-based heuristics rather than a discounted present value valuation model. The evidence presented here for the behavior of analysts is consistent with prior evidence showing over-extrapolation of growth and earnings persistence in stock prices.

This book is a study of earnings management, aimed at scholars and professionals in accounting, finance, economics, and law. The authors address research questions including: Why are earnings so important that firms feel compelled to manipulate them? What set of circumstances will induce earnings management? How will the interaction among management, boards of directors, investors, employees, suppliers, customers and regulators affect earnings management? How to design empirical research addressing earnings management? What are the limitations and strengths of current empirical models?

Intends to present advanced studies in the application of forecasting methodologies to such areas as sales, marketing, and strategic decision making. This title includes topics such as: sales and marketing, forecasting, new product forecasting, judgmentally-based forecasting, the application of surveys to forecasting, and sales response models.

This book will help you gain a master of business administration (MBA) degree. Think you’ve got what it takes to become a future leader? An MBA could help you achieve those goals. Intensive, competitive and highly respected, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) is an elite professional qualification. This book provides best reports with good grades. Reading the papers, you can get a sense of how to write a good paper to get good grades. This is a book that tells you how to get good grades on MBA courses in the U.S. For the MBA course, students have to take a total of 36 credits. Each class is worth 3 credits and the students should take 12 classes. It's a series of 12 books, one book for each subject. This book is a collection of best answers for the "Behavioral Corporate Finance" subject.

Little attention has been paid to a principal decision context in which analysts' earnings forecasts are prepared, namely, as an input to their recommendations. We use two data sets, Value Line, USA, and Research Evaluation Service, Canada, and examine the importance of analysts' earnings forecasts for their stock price forecasts via three hypotheses: (1) analysts' earnings forecasts are important for their stock price forecasts; (2) analysts' long-term earnings forecasts are more important than their short-term earnings forecasts for their predictions of stock prices over a particular stock price forecast horizon; (3) the importance of analysts' earnings forecasts for their stock price forecasts rises as the joint earnings and stock price forecast horizon increases. We show that: (1) when the earnings forecast horizon is the next fiscal year, forecasted earnings explain only 30% of the variation in forecasted price; (2) the importance of forecasted earnings for forecasted price rises as the earnings forecast horizon increases; (3) in the long run, (i.e. three to five years hence), forecasted earnings explain about 60% of the variation in forecasted price. Decision usefulness is an ex ante concept, but tests regarding the usefulness of earnings for stock price generally have used actual (not expectational) data. Our evidence suggests that earnings expectations are decision useful, where the decision context is sell-side analysts' stock price forecasts. Our results are potentially important to users of sell-side analyst research reports. When a stock recommendation is accompanied only by short-run earnings forecasts, investors need to closely examine estimates of non-earnings variables to assess the quality of stock recommendations. In contrast, when stock recommendations are accompanied by both short-run and long-run earnings forecasts, investors need to examine estimates of non-earnings information variables less closely.