分析师团队能提高盈余预测准确性吗?

An Empirical Study on Earnings Forecast Performance of Analyst Team Versus Analyst Individual

本文以2007—2016年沪、深两市的A股上市公司为研究对象,探讨了分析师团队与分析师个人在盈余预测表现是否存在差异,以及这种差异的影响因素。研究发现,分析师团队的盈余预测准确性高于分析师个人,但团队所发布的研究报告的及时性要弱于个人分析师。进一步研究表明,在信息环境较差或盈余波动性较大的公司,分析师团队盈余预测准确的结果更显著。本文的研究借鉴团队的相关理论,为解读分析师盈余预测准确性与发布报告及时性提供了新的视角,并对资本市场中投资者如何有效选择和使用分析师报告具有一定的参考价值。

Teamwork is playing an increasingly important role in business including brokerage firms(Cohen and Bailey,1997).Given the growing complexity of the stock market,team has been widely used in sell-side equity analyst industry in China from 2006.In 2016,the number of analyst teams accounted for 46.89%of the total analysts,and the number of research reports issued by analyst teams accounted for 45.05%of the total.However,we know little about the analyst teams,although they have occupied an important position in analyst industry.Therefore,this paper studies the analyst teams behavior to fetch up this gap.Prior research on social psychology reports mixed evidence on whether teams outperform individuals,while accounting studies indicate that the performance of teams versus individuals be contingent on different dimensions(Brown and Hugon,2009;Fang and Hope,2018).Thus,this study tries to give an answer by using Chinese data.Using 2007-2016 the Chinese listed firms as the samples,this paper discusses whether there are differences in earnings forecast performance between analyst team and analyst individual,and what factors could influence the differences.First,this paper compares the characteristics of forecasts between analyst teams and analyst individual.Using the forecast measures,the results indicate that,compared with individuals following the same firm-periods,analyst teams forecast more accurately and in a less timely manner.To more completely evaluate team forecast performance,this paper controls for a set of analyst forecast control variables,year effects and industry effects.After that,this paper finds that the earnings forecast of the analyst team was less accurate than that of the analyst individual,but the research report issued by the team was more timely than that of the individual.Further analyses document that this relation is stronger in firms with poor information environment or high degree of earnings volatility.The results are completely contrary to the research by Brown and Hugon in 2009,which using data of the United States.Their result show that the accuracy of earnings forecasts of analyst teams is lower than that of individual analysts,and the timeliness of forecasts of analyst teams is higher than that of individual analyst.which is because analyst teams pay more attention to the timeliness of reports in order to meet the demands of the stock market.This difference may be due to two reasons.One is the stock markets of China and the United States are totally different,so there are natural differences in analysts behavior and performance.The other one is the data used in Brown and Hugon(2009)were relatively old(1993-2005),and the analyst teams was immature and accounted for a small proportion in the industry(analyst team accounted for only 5.8%of the total sample in their research,but 37.9%in this paper).Therefore,there is a difference between prior paper and this paper.This paper makes contributions to several aspects.Firstly,this study not only provides a new perspective to understand analyst earnings forecast accuracy and timeliness,but also introduces a new variable in analyst research.Previous studies implicitly assume that analysts work individually and does not take into account the effect of the analyst s team members.There is limited research on analyst teams,and this paper provides a new evidence that analysts teamwork is an important characteristic that is associated with analyst performance.Secondly,this paper is benefit for understanding the impact of firms information environment and earnings volatility on accuracy of analysts earnings forecast.The empirical results show that analyst teams forecasting more accurate are more pronounced for firms with poor information environment or high degree of earnings volatility.This also reflects analyst team s advantages in information collection and processing.Thirdly,this paper contributes to the literature examining the differential performance between teams and individuals.In this study,analyst team produce high quality of output,suggesting that the benefit of teamwork outweighs the costs due to coordinating as well as the free-rider problem.Lastly,the conclusions have practical implications for participants of capital market.For example,for investors who rely on analysts research report,it is better to choose analyst teams report.Meanwhile,for brokerages,they should set up more analyst teams to follow listed companies to issue more accurate earnings forecast.