Analyst earnings forecast precision and local advantage: evidence from American depositary receipt firms

Prior research has documented a finding that local analysts provide more accurate earnings forecasts than nonlocal analysts in many settings. However, little is known about local and nonlocal analysts’ relative earnings forecast abilities for ADR stocks. In this study, we find that the local advantage disappears for ADR stocks and that nonlocal analysts in fact outperform local ones in this case. We investigate the source of this ‘local disadvantage’ and find evidence against hypotheses based on accounting standards and exchange rates. We document that the local advantage decreases with increased investor interest in foreign firms, consistent with our nonlocal investors’ interest hypothesis.     

Detecting overproduction: Evidence from inventory write-down

We use inventory write-downs to differentiate opportunistic and non-opportunistic overproduction measures. We posit that non-opportunistic overproduction is positively associated with future write-downs because overproduction generally leads to excess inventory, while opportunistic overproduction (to inflate earnings) is negatively associated with write-downs because write-downs decrease earnings. We find that change-based proxies (deviations from past behaviour) are positively associated with the likelihood of future write-downs, whereas residual-based proxies (deviations from industry norms) are negatively associated with this likelihood, suggesting that the former (latter) primarily capture non-opportunistic (opportunistic) overproduction. Our study highlights the importance of using appropriate overproduction measures for each research setting.