Empiricists document that firms more often voluntarily disclose bad news than good news and link this pessimism to managers' increased incentives not to fall short of earnings expectations. This paper analyzes the voluntary disclosure of a manager's private information by explicitly considering her incentives to meet or beat an analyst's earnings forecast. The model predicts that managers who face strong incentives to meet or beat these forecasts more frequently disclose bad news than good news in order to guide analysts' expectations about future earnings downward. This pessimism is higher in markets with less informed managers and may hold even if the manager has strong incentives for high stock prices and meet-or-beat incentives are comparably low.

The primary objective of this paper is to examine the relationships between voluntary earning disclosures made by French-listed firms and financial analysts' behavior. This paper focuses on voluntary earnings disclosures' contribution in explaining analysts' coverage and their earnings forecasts properties including forecast error and dispersion. We examine voluntary disclosures and analyst coverage as two decisions that could be endogenously determined. Our sample includes 154 French-listed firms from 1998 to 2001. Results using simultaneous equation model show that the disclosure decision influences and is not influenced by financial analysts' coverage, suggesting analysts choose to follow firms with high voluntary disclosure practices. Additional findings show that voluntary earnings disclosures are likely to improve analysts' forecasts accuracy and to reduce the dispersion among financial analysts' forecasts suggesting these disclosures reduce market uncertainty about forecasted earnings. These findings imply that corporate disclosure policy is helpful to financial analysts.

We examine the relationship between disclosure of nonfinancial information and analyst forecast accuracy using firm-level data from 31 countries. We use the issuance of standalone corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to proxy for disclosure of nonfinancial information. We find that the issuance of standalone CSR reports is associated with lower analyst forecast error. This relationship is stronger in countries that are more stakeholder-oriented -- i.e., in countries where CSR performance is more likely to affect firm financial performance. The relationship is also stronger for firms and countries with more opaque financial disclosure, suggesting that issuance of standalone CSR reports plays a role complementary to financial disclosure. These results hold after we control for various factors related to firm financial transparency and other potentially confounding institutional factors. Collectively, our findings have important implications for academics and practitioners in understanding the function of CSR disclosure in financial markets.

We investigate whether voluntary disclosures of product and business expansion plans affect analyst coverage and forecasts. We find that the level of analyst coverage is positively associated with the incidence of disclosures of product and business expansion plans. We also find that product and business expansion disclosures increase the informativeness of analyst earnings forecasts. We find no evidence that product and business expansion disclosures increase analyst forecast errors. Overall, our study contributes to understanding the role of product and business expansion disclosures in analyst forecast behaviour.