We examine the relationship between disclosure of nonfinancial information and analyst forecast accuracy using firm-level data from 31 countries. We use the issuance of stand-alone corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to proxy for disclosure of nonfinancial information. We find that the issuance of stand-alone CSR reports is associated with lower analyst forecast error. This relationship is stronger in countries that are more stakeholder-oriented—i.e., in countries where CSR performance is more likely to affect firm financial performance. The relationship is also stronger for firms and countries with more opaque financial disclosure, suggesting that issuance of stand-alone CSR reports plays a role complementary to financial disclosure. These results hold after we control for various factors related to firm financial transparency and other potentially confounding institutional factors. Collectively, our findings have important implications for academics and practitioners in understanding the function of CSR disclosure in financial markets. Data Availability: The data are publicly available from the sources identified in the paper.

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This study tests whether the observed patterns in stock returns after quarterly earnings announcements are related to the proportion of firm shares held by institutional investors, a variable used by prior research to proxy for investor sophistication. Our findings show that the institutional holdings variable is negatively correlated with the observed post-announcement abnormal returns. Our findings also show that traditional proxies for transaction costs (i.e., trading volume, stock price) as well as firm size have little incremental power to explain post-announcement abnormal returns when institutional holdings is an explanatory variable. If institutional ownership is a valid proxy for investor sophistication, these findings suggest that the trading activity of unsophisticated investors underlies the predictability of stock returns after earnings announcements. However, tests evaluating the validity of institutional holdings as a proxy for investor sophistication yield only mixed results. This calls for caution in interpreting our findings.

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