Effects of Management Earnings Forecasts on Future earnings response coefficient

Management earnings forecasts and their characteristics may provide a signal about managers’ private information and/or confidence in their assertions. The signal allows investors to understand the relationship between management forecasts and future earnings better, taking investors to price securities accordingly. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether issuance of management forecasts and characteristics of the forecasts affect the relationship between returns and future earnings. In this study, use of the FERC is particularly appropriate because various characteristics of management forecasts could have implications for the prediction of future earnings. A forecast with characteristics that improves ability of investors to predict future earnings should result in stock prices that better predict future earnings, and results in a higher FERC. We follow Gelb and Zarowin (2002), Tucker and Zarowin (2006) and Choi and et al(2008)in Our empirical tests, which use 347 firm/year observations from 2006 to 2011. Our empirical findings showed management forecasts affect the association between returns and future earnings, if management forecasts are more frequent and precise. Moreover, we extend models further with control variables such as firm size, growth and profitable to the control for possible correlated omitted variables. Our empirical findings showed that management forecasts affect the association between returns and future earnings if management forecasts are more frequent and precise. Forecasts with the characteristics viewed by investors are more credible than the forecasts without the characteristics.