This book provides a detailed analysis of the accuracy of forecasts made by individual analysts across nine different industries. It explores the factors that contribute to forecast accuracy and provides insights into how these factors can be used to improve forecasting performance. The author, Patricia C. O'Brien, is a well-respected economist and her research has significant implications for businesses and investors who rely on forecasts in their decision-making processes. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from Forecast Accuracy of Individual Analysts: A Nine-Industry Study Current databases of analysts' forecasts of corporate earnings include predictions from thousands of individuals employed at hundreds of financial service institutions. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether it is possible to distinguish forecasters with superior ability on the basis of ex Egg; forecast accuracy from panel data. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Forecasting is required in many situations. Stocking an inventory may require forecasts of demand months in advance. Telecommunication routing requires traffic forecasts a few minutes ahead. Whatever the circumstances or time horizons involved, forecasting is an important aid in effective and efficient planning. This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods and presents enough information about each method for readers to use them sensibly.

Financial analysts provide information in their research reports and thereby help forming expectations of a firm’s future business performance. Thus, it is essential to recognize analysts who provide the most precise forecasts and the accounting literature identifies characteristics that help finding the most accurate analysts. Tanja Klettke detects new relationships and identifies two new determinants of earnings forecast accuracy. These new determinants are an analyst’s “general forecast effort” and the “number of supplementary forecasts”. Within two comprehensive empirical investigations she proves these measures’ power to explain accuracy differences. Tanja Klettke’s research helps investors and researchers to identify more accurate earnings forecasts.

Accounting for Income Taxes is the most comprehensive review of AFIT research. It is designed both to introduce new scholars to this field and to encourage active researchers to expand frontiers related to accounting for income taxes. Accounting for Income Taxes includes both a primer about the rules governing AFIT (Sections 3-4) and a review of the scholarly studies in the field (Sections 5-8). The primer uses accessible examples and clear language to express essential AFIT rules and institutional features. Section 3 reviews the basic rules and institutional details governing AFIT. Section 4 discusses ways that researchers, policymakers, and other interested parties can use the tax information in financial statements to better approximate information in the tax return. The second half of the monograph reviews the extant scholarly studies by splitting the research literature into four topics: earnings management, the association between book-tax differences and earnings characteristics, the equity market pricing of information in the tax accounts, and book-tax conformity. Section 5 focuses on the use of the tax accounts to manage earnings through the valuation allowance, the income tax contingency, and permanently reinvested foreign earnings. Section 6 discusses the association between book-tax differences and earnings characteristics, namely earnings growth and earnings persistence. Section 7 explores how tax information is reflected in share prices. Section 8 reviews the increased alignment of accounting for book purposes and tax purposes. The remainder of the paper focuses on topics of general interest in the economics and econometric literatures. Section 9 highlights some issues of general importance including a theoretical framework to interpret and guide empirical AFIT studies, the disaggregated components of book-tax differences and research opportunities as the U.S. moves toward International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Section 10 discusses econometric weaknesses that are common in AFIT research and proposes ways to mitigate their deleterious effects.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST “The most important book on decision making since Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.”—Jason Zweig, The Wall Street Journal Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught? In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters." In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.