Analysts' Earnings Forecasts Bias and the Confirmatory Role of Accounting

10.6293/AQAFA.2011.09.04

Yoel Beniluz

The confirmatory role of accounting ； Disciplinary role of accounting ； Accounting as a disciplinary mechanism ； Accounting quality ； Quality of accounting information ； Analysts earnings forecasts bias ； Earnings forecasts bias ； Earnings management

Advances in Quantitative Analysis of Finance and Accounting

9期（2011 / 06 / 01）

75 - 112

英文

This paper empirically examines the confirmatory role of accounting with respect to financial analysts. The confirmatory role of accounting relates to the function of accounting that serves as disciplinary mechanism on other sources of information such as management voluntary forward-looking statements. More specifically, the paper empirically investigates whether higher quality of accounting information enhances the quality of information provided by financial analysts. In general, analysts face incentives to optimistically bias their long-horizon earnings forecasts. Future accounting information will confirm or contradict current predictions made by analysts, thereby disciplining analysts when making these predictions. Higher quality of accounting information better reveals systematic optimistic bias in analysts' forecasts and therefore imposes higher costs on such behavior. I predict and find that higher accounting quality is negatively associated with the optimistic bias in analysts' forecasts. The paper also examines whether the importance of accounting as a disciplinary mechanism increases with the intensity of incentives to optimistically bias the information. The findings show that the negative relation between the optimistic bias and the accounting quality measure is more pronounced when stronger incentives to bias the information are present.

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