Analysts’ annual earnings forecasts and changes to the I/B/E/S database

Analyst Dividend Forecasts and Their Usefulness to Investors

“…Call, Hewitt, Watkins and Yohn (2020) find that EPS forecast accuracy improves for more recent vintages of I/B/E/S data, consistent with coverage bias by I/B/E/S. We compared a 2-year earlier vintage of our data, and found small decreases in dividend forecast errors across overlapping periods in the two samples (0.79% using the earlier vintage vs. 0.76% in Table4).…”

“…Nevertheless, conclusions from other tests are unaffected when using the earlier vintage data. The small impact in our setting likely reflects the fact that theCall et al (2020) results are concentrated in "younger, less followed firms with lower profits and stronger earnings growth" (p. 2), which are less likely to be reflected in our sample of dividend payers.…”

The Roles of Data Providers and Analysts in the Production, Dissemination, and Pricing of Street Earnings

“…Our examination of the 2009 I/B/E/S methodology change extends prior work documenting material changes in the I/B/E/S database over time (e.g., Call et al. [2021]), and helps explain the differences between I/B/E/S actuals and analyst‐inferred actuals documented by Brown and Larocque [2013]. Accordingly, our findings are relevant to both market participants and researchers who rely on FDP‐produced data.…”

Do buy‐side analysts inform sell‐side analyst research?

“…Nonetheless, we conduct additional tests to mitigate the concern. In column (1) of Table 4 we first examine whether predictors of sell-side analyst forecast accuracy influence INTERSECTION by regressing the latter on past accuracy (Brown, 2001) and firm-specific experience (Brown et al, 2016;Call et al, 2021;Clement, 1999). 25 The results provide mixed evidence in that the relations between INTERSECTION and past accuracy and experience are marginally significantly negative and significantly positive, respectively.…”