​Earnings forecasts are ubiquitous in today’s financial markets. They are essential indicators of future firm performance and a starting point for firm valuation. Extremely inaccurate and overoptimistic forecasts during the most recent financial crisis have raised serious doubts regarding the reliability of such forecasts. This thesis therefore investigates new determinants of forecast errors and accuracy. In addition, new determinants of forecast revisions are examined. More specifically, the thesis answers the following questions: 1) How do analyst incentives lead to forecast errors? 2) How do changes in analyst incentives lead to forecast revisions?, and 3) What factors drive differences in forecast accuracy?

Financial analysts provide information in their research reports and thereby help forming expectations of a firm’s future business performance. Thus, it is essential to recognize analysts who provide the most precise forecasts and the accounting literature identifies characteristics that help finding the most accurate analysts. Tanja Klettke detects new relationships and identifies two new determinants of earnings forecast accuracy. These new determinants are an analyst’s “general forecast effort” and the “number of supplementary forecasts”. Within two comprehensive empirical investigations she proves these measures’ power to explain accuracy differences. Tanja Klettke’s research helps investors and researchers to identify more accurate earnings forecasts.

How well does it pay to own the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s best-performing stock of the year? Over the 2012-2021 period, the one-year total return ranged from 80% to 743%. This book identifies the quantitative and qualitative traits of stocks that made it to #1 and tells the stories of how they got there. A key indicator, the Fridson-Lee Statistic, makes its debut in these pages. Aiming for the massive upside of the #1 stocks entails substantial risk. It’s not something to do with more than a small percentage of your portfolio. But attempting to pick the coming year’s top performer can provide an outlet for speculative impulses that might otherwise spoil a prudent, long-term investment plan. And by investigating the statistically determined best candidates for #1, you’ll gain important insights into stock selection. The Little Book of Picking Top Stocks explains why conventional equity research provides only limited help in zeroing in on the index’s future top performer. Spotting the #1 stock isn’t Wall Street analysts’ focus, although the information they furnish about companies’ competitive strategies is quite helpful. Problematically, investment banks’ fundamental stock reports are structured around a valuation metric that was discredited nearly half a century ago—earnings per share. Author Martin Fridson’s previous writings on the stock market include the books It Was a Very Good Year and Investment Illusions, as well as articles such as “Ben Graham’s Value Approach: Can It Still Work?” He has received the CFA Society of New York’s Ben Graham Award and has been named the Financial Management Association International’s Financial Executive of the Year. The Green Magazine called his Financial Statement Analysis (co-authored with Fernando Alvarez) “one of the most useful investment books ever.”

The impact of multinationality on the operations of a firm is clear and strong. Riahi-Belkaoui shows how it affects the known relationships between earnings, efficiency, disclosure, and market valuation by its role as a dependent, moderating, intervening antecedant or consequent variable. Its impact can be felt, for example, in relationships and phenomena such as the timeliness and the informativeness of earnings, the underreaction of securities analysts, post-earnings announcement drifts, and the level and quality of disclosure. An understanding of multinationality in the earnings-disclosure-efficiency-market valuation relationship can also be used by accountants and researchers in their daily activities, and by corporate executives in multinational organizational decision making. The result is a useful, probing exploration for academics and practitioners alike.

Financial analysts play an ambivalent role on financial markets: On the one hand investors and the media frequently follow their advice, on the other hand they are regularly discredited when their forecasts or recommendations prove to be erroneous. This cumulative thesis explores the informational content of financial analysts’ forecasts for investors by addressing three specific topics: Consensus size as a rudimentary investment signal, the association of analysts’ target prices with business sentiment, and the consistency of analysts’ different investment signals in the context of the 2008 financial crisis. Overall, the thesis provides additional evidence that investors can profit from analysts’ forecasts and recommendations. However, it is also shown that investors need to be very selective about which signal to rely on and in which context to use these because analysts’ investment signals can also be heavily biased and erroneous. About the author: Jan-Philipp Matthewes studied ‘Economics’ at the University of Cologne, Germany, and holds a Dean’s Award from the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. His research focus on financial analysts evolved while working in equity research at a leading German bank. The PhD-thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Martin Wallmeier, Finance and Accounting, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Since 2013 Jan-Philipp Matthewes is the managing director of the boutique private equity firm ‘Matthewes Capital Invest GmbH’.

Despite the globalization of accounting standards occurring through convergence to International Financial Reporting Standards, local accounting systems are deeply intertwined with each country’s unique institutions such as its corporate system, disclosure practices and enforcement mechanisms. First, this book empirically analyzes the effects of globalization and localization of accounting rules on corporate behavior such as earnings management, signaling, investment behavior and dividend payout policy. Second, the book unravels the economic consequences of disclosure based on the concept of self-disciplining enforcement such as management forecasts, environmental disclosures and risk disclosures by Japanese firms. This volume is a step forward in understanding the link between accounting and corporate behavior based on a new institutional accounting approach.

Advances in Quantitative Analysis of Finance and Accounting (New Series) is an annual publication designed to disseminate developments in the quantitative analysis of finance and accounting. The publication is a forum for statistical and quantitative analyses of issues in finance and accounting as well as applications of quantitative methods to problems in financial management, financial accounting, and business management. The objective is to promote interaction between academic research in finance and accounting and applied research in the financial community and the accounting profession. The papers in this volume cover a wide range of topics including corporate finance and debt management, earnings management, equity market, auditing, option pricing theory, and interest rate theory. In this volume there are eleven chapters, five of them are corporate finance and debt management: 1. Liquidity and Adverse Selection: Evidence from the Five-or-Fewer Rule Change; 2. Changing Business Environment and the Value of Relevance of Accounting Information; 3. Pricing Risky Securities in Hidden Markov-Modulated Poisson Processes; 4. An Empirical Assessment of Alternative Dividend Expectation Models; 5. Quantitative Market Risk Disclosure, Bond Default Risk and The Cost of Debt: Why Value At Risk? There are two of the other six chapters which cover interest rate theory: 1. Positive Interest Rates and Yields: Additional Serious Considerations; 2. Collapse of Dimensionality in the Interest Rate Term Structure. The remaining four chapters cover financial analysts earnings forecasts, equity market, auditing, and option pricing theory. These four papers are: 1. Investors’ Apparent Under-weighting of Financial Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts: The Role of Share Price Scaling and Omitted Risk Factors; 2. Predicting Stock Price by Applying the Residual Income Model and Bayesian Statistics; 3. Intertemporal Associations Between Non-Audit Services and Auditors’ Tendency to Allow Discretionary Accruals; 4. Put Option Portfolio Insurance vs. Asset Allocation.

Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research promotes research across all areas of accounting, incorporating theory from, and contributing knowledge to, the fields of applied psychology, sociology, management science, ethics and economics.