Dòng Nội dung
1
Do analysts affect bad news timeliness? / Alex Young. // Accounting and Business Research Vol.48, No.2
2018.
p. 171-189.

I investigate the effect of analysts on the speed with which bad news is reflected in earnings. Intuitively, the more analysts that cover a firm, the more costly it will be for the firm to keep bad news suppressed. Thus, analyst coverage should positively affect bad news timeliness (BNT) (but not necessarily the differential timeliness of bad news over good news, or conditional conservatism). Using brokerage house mergers as a natural experiment with a difference-in-differences design, I find that an exogenous decrease in analyst coverage decreases BNT; that is, analysts positively affect BNT. The decrease in BNT is robust to controlling for unobserved firm heterogeneity, using a propensity score matched sample, persists for up to three years after the brokerage house merger, and is stronger for firms with relatively low analyst coverage before the merger. The result improves our understanding of how analysts affect a firm s information environment.
2
Exploration intensity, analysts’ private information development and their forecast performance / Xiaomeng Chen, Sue Wright, Hai Wu. // Accounting and Business Research Volume 48, No 1
2018.
p. 77-107.

This study examines whether analysts in the extractive industries in Australia adjust their private information searching and processing in response to the complexity of information about a firm’s exploration and evaluation (E&E) activities. We find that both the proportion of private information in their forecasts and the accuracy of their forecasts increase with the intensity of E&E activities. Additional analyses reveal that this effect is more pronounced for firms with substantial E&E activities but limited production activities, and that analysts’ private information development activities are mainly related to the capitalized E&E expenditures. Our results provide guidance for both investors and future standard setters. They show that investors can benefit from analysts’ expertise in situations of high information asymmetry. They also provide evidence of the advantage of distinguishing successful from unsuccessful investments in resource exploration when accounting for E&E expenditures, which may inform future decisions about accounting for intangible assets.