Time/时间： 10月21日（周五）10:00-11:30
Venue/地点：Room 501, Jiageng Building 2/嘉庚二号楼501教室
Online Conference ID/腾讯会议号：924-860-157
Topic/题目：Crowdsourced earnings forecasts: implications for sell-side analysts’ earnings forecasts strategies
Speaker/报告人： 李皖昀助理教授
Abstract/摘要：The paper investigates whether financial analysts exploit investors’ earnings expectations for a firm to ‘walk down’ their earnings forecasts with an aim to create beatable forecasts. We infer investors’ earnings expectations from crowdsourced earnings estimates on Estimize, which contains 879,015 ‘street earnings’ estimates submitted by 70,926 investors from January 2012 to September 2018. We document a positive association between analyst forecast revision and a change in investors’ earnings expectations. We also find that the likelihood of analysts issuing forecasts that generate pessimistic errors is high when they revise their forecasts down. These findings are consistent with analysts opportunistically manipulating earnings forecasts to exploit investors’ expectations of future earnings. This study extends the literature on how market forces constrain analysts’ conflicts of interest by demonstrating that new crowdsourcing technologies disrupt the market for traditional earnings forecast providers. It also informs regulators how sharing their opinions on these public platforms may expose investors to exploitation by more sophisticated market participants who possess the processing power to harness the enormous volume of these scattered pieces of information.
About the Speaker/报告人简介：李皖昀，现任厦门大学财务管理与会计研究院助理教授，博士毕业于澳大利亚国立大学商学院。其研究兴趣主要包括财务会计，大数据与数据分析，会计信息系统。