Analyst Earnings Forecasts for Publicly Traded Insurance Companies

Several trends in the insurance and financial services industry, including demutualizationconsolidation, and deregulation, have attracted increasing attention from investors and financial analysts. This paper investigates the accuracy of the earnings forecasts of financial analysts for insurance companies. Our empirical results indicate that analyst forecasts outperform random walk time-series forecasts. Furthermore, we find that both disagreement over earnings forecasts among analysts and the relative forecasting error in the mean forecasts is smaller for life insurers than for property-casualty insurers, whereas the relative errors for forecasts for multiple-line insurers are in between the two. Forecasting error is a negative function of firm size and the number of analysts who are following a company, and is a positive function of the disagreement among analysts.Analyst forecasts have a timing advantage over the random walk model. Our results also suggest that the fair value reporting requirement (SFAS 115), which has been in effect since 1994, has enhanced the accuracy of analyst forecasts. The SFAS 115 has improved the superiority of analyst forecasts over the random walk forecasts for life insurers, but not for property-casualty insurers, and there is a weak improvement for multiple-line insurers. JEL Classification: G15     

The firm information environment and capital structure: international evidence

This article investigates the effect of the firm information environment, characterized by the analyst characteristics, on firms’ capital structure choices and whether this effect varies according to country-level institutional environments. Using a comprehensive international data set that covers 19 939 firms across 41 countries between 2000 and 2010, we document two key findings. First, firms with lower analyst coverage, higher forecast dispersion and higher forecast errors have higher leverage. Second, the effect of the firm information environment on corporate leverage is attenuated in countries with stronger governance mechanism and better information transparency. This result suggests that a firm’s information environment is an important factor influencing its capital structure decision and that country-level institutional environments matter to this effect.     

环境规制能提升产能利用率吗?——基于中国制造业行业面板数据的经验研究

当前我国制造业存在产能利用率普遍偏低的问题,利用环境规制政策倒逼企业调整生产投资来促进产能利用率提升具有重要意义,但现有研究忽视了环境规制政策对产能利用率的传导机制及异质性影响,难以提出有针对性和差异化的对策.文章主要考察了环境规制对制造业产能利用率的影响及其具体传导机制,深入研究了环境规制对产能利用率的异质性影响,并对其传导机制的异质性进行了检验.研究表明:环境规制对产能利用率具有显著促进作用,并且通过遵循成本效应和创新补偿效应两个渠道发挥作用,环境规制更多是通过淘汰不满足环境标准的产能来提高产能利用率,而通过加强技术创新创造新的市场需求来提升产能利用率的作用有限;国有企业和小企业比重的增加将会减弱环境规制对产能利用率的促进作用,私营企业和大中企业比重的提高则会促进环境规制对产能利用率的积极影响.环境规制对偏重度污染行业产能利用率的促进作用更强,环境规制的遵循成本效应和创新补偿效应在上述不同产权性质、企业规模和污染强度下的作用程度也各异.研究结论对如何利用环保硬约束监督管理手段来化解产能过剩,以及在供给侧结构性改革背景下减少无效、低端供给和推动创新发展战略等具有启示意义.     

审计师选择对财务分析师盈余预测的影响研究

文章基于国内外关于审计师选择以及财务分析师盈余预测的相关研究,从委托代理假设、信号传递假设的角度分析了财务分析师在对企业进行盈余分析时,能否认知审计师选择这一信息。研究结果显示,财务分析师的盈余预测与审计师选择呈正向相关,但是不显著,说明了财务分析师对审计师选择信息的认知度较弱,我国的资本市场还存在信息传递误区,以及上市公司内部存在代理冲突等问题。     

Fair Value‐related Information in Analysts’ Decision Processes: Evidence from the Financial Crisis

We use a sample of conference calls and analyst research reports from international banks to examine how financial analysts request and communicate fair value‐related information in their valuation process. We find that analysts devote considerable attention to fair value‐related topics. Most of the conference call questions and references in research reports pertain to fair value reclassifications and fair value changes of liabilities resulting from banks’ own credit risk. The accounting impact of these one‐time effects during the financial crisis and a lack of corresponding firm disclosures help to explain the prevalence of these two topics. The content of the questions and references suggests that analysts have different motives for their interest in fair value‐related information. While some analysts adjust reported earnings for unrecognised fair value changes of reclassified assets, most of the observed analysts exclude banks’ own credit risk effects from reported earnings. Thus, the use of fair value‐related information varies substantially across analysts and across instruments.     

The effect of restatements on analyst behavior

This paper examines how changes in the credibility of financial reporting affect analyst behavior. Using a sample of restatement firms experiencing a substantial change in credibility over 1997–2006, we document that restatements have a long‐lived effect on analyst behavior and that analysts differentiate between restatements caused by irregularities and those caused by errors. We find that while irregularity restatement firms exhibit a reduction in analyst coverage and forecast accuracy and an increase in forecast dispersion in the post‐restatement period, other restatement firms exhibit only an increase in forecast error. Finally, we find evidence to suggest that remedial actions reduce the effect of irregularity restatements on analyst behavior. Overall, these results are consistent with the notion that restatements affect analyst behavior in forming judgements regarding subsequent earnings announcements.     

Analyst underreaction and the post-forecast revision drift

The post-forecast revision drift (PFRD), the phenomenon of delayed stock price reactions to analyst forecast revisions, is a well-documented market anomaly. Prior research attributes PFRD to underreaction by investors to analyst forecast revisions. This study investigates the role of the analyst forecast revision process itself in the PFRD anomaly. Using a large sample of US firms, we confirm prior findings of a positive serial correlation (momentum) in individual analysts’ revisions to their earnings forecasts and, based on both indirect and direct tests, document a positive association between this momentum and PFRD. Further analyses reveal that both the forecast revision momentum and PFRD vary in similar ways with respect to the nature of the news driving the revisions and the information environment. Collectively, our findings show that underreaction by individual analysts in the forecast revision process is an important contributor to the PFRD phenomenon.     

Taxable income,future profitability,and stock returns

Prior research suggests that investors behave ‘as if’ taxable income contains information about future performance by providing evidence of a positive association between taxable income and stock returns. We draw on the fundamental analysis literature and provide direct evidence on this assertion by examining whether taxable income predicts future pretax performance. We find that taxable income positively predicts future pretax cash flows, pretax book income, and ‘Street’ pretax earnings, suggesting that taxable income provides incremental information to book income regarding performance. Moreover, we find a positive association between taxable income and analysts’ pretax forecasts, consistent with analysts utilizing the information in taxable income when forming earnings expectations. We do not find an association between taxable income and future analyst forecast errors, implying analysts do not overreact or underreact to taxable income's performance signal. Overall, we find that taxable income provides a signal of fundamental value and corroborate the implications of prior research.     

Trend following with momentum versus moving averages: a tale of differences

Despite the ever-growing interest in trend following and a series of publications in academic journals, there is a dearth of theoretical results on the properties of trend-following rules. Our paper fills this gap by comparing and contrasting the two most popular trend-following rules, the momentum (MOM) and moving average (MA) rules, from a theoretical perspective. We provide theoretical results on the similarity between different trend-following rules and the forecast accuracy of trading rules. Our results show that the similarity between the MOM and MA rules is high and increases with the strength of the trend. However, compared to the MOM rule, the MA rules exhibit more robust forecast accuracy for the future direction of price trends. In this paper, we also develop a hypothesis about uncertain market dynamics. We show that this hypothesis, coupled with our analytical results, has far-reaching practical implications and can explain a number of empirical observations. Among other things, our hypothesis explains why the empirical performance of the MA rules is better than that of the MOM rule. We broaden the appeal and practical importance of our theoretical results by offering various illustrations and real-world examples.     

环境管理体系认证能够抑制股价崩盘风险吗？

近年来，随着环境政策日趋严格，环境负面消息累积导致的股价崩盘风险不断提高。文章基于2007-2019年中国沪深两市A股重污染企业的经验数据，探讨了环境管理体系认证对股价崩盘风险的影响。研究发现，环境管理体系认证能够显著抑制股价崩盘风险，且当媒体关注越高、分析师关注越高时，环境管理体系认证对股价崩盘风险的抑制作用更强。进一步探讨影响机制发现，环境管理体系认证主要通过治理机制和信息机制来影响股价崩盘风险，换言之，环境管理体系认证能够通过提高公司环境绩效和公司信息透明度来抑制股价崩盘风险。研究结论揭示了环境管理体系认证具有资本市场有效性，丰富了股价崩盘风险的影响因素研究，对于政府完善环境管理体系认证制度以提高资本市场稳定性、企业优化战略决策以提升企业价值具有重要的借鉴意义。