Analysts Job Change and Earnings Forecast Behaviors

Abstract

This paper investigates the impacts of sell-side analysts job change on their earnings forecasting behaviors. Using earnings forecasts issued by sell-side analysts in Korean brokerage houses from 2000 to 2018, we find that both forecast frequency and forecast boldness increase after analysts move to another brokerage house. The results are robust to the inclusion of year fixed effects and analyst fixed effects. Based on the idea that the change in forecasting behaviors is attributed to the transiting analysts concerns about their relative disadvantages in the tournament of the new brokerage houses, we further predict and find that the association is mitigated when the analysts are well-reputed, follow firms of high importance, and have previous job change experience. We further divide the sample based on the rankings of brokerage houses and find that, the increase in forecast frequency and forecast boldness is pronounced only when analysts move to low-rank brokerage houses, and their increase in forecast boldness lowers the overall accuracy of the forecasts. By analyzing the relationship between analysts job change and their subsequent forecasting behaviors, we suggest that analysts personal backgrounds can provide an important factor that determines the quality of their earnings forecasts.