Does corporate governance affect financial analysts’ stock recommendations, target prices accuracy and earnings forecast characteristics? An empirical investigation of US companies

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how corporate governance quality affects the analyst’s stock recommendations, forecast efficiency and target price accuracy on New York Stock Exchange. In particular, as corporate governance is often uncertain and ambiguous to investors, expert financial advisors may use transparent corporate governance information to set their recommendations and improve the level of accuracy of their earnings forecasts. According to agency and signaling theories, good governance mechanisms aim to mitigate agency conflicts and boost corporate transparency. Thus, we argue that they can serve as mediators during the forecasting process and we expect a strong significant relationship between the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms and analyst activity. Five hypotheses are tested with a large sample of 154 US market firms over a 17-year period (2004–2020). Our empirical findings point out some special features of US stock markets. We find evidence that analysts tend to issue favorable recommendations, more accurate, less dispersed and more optimistic earnings forecasts for most well-governed firms. Furthermore, we show that higher-quality governance transparency is an important determinant of financial analysts’ behavior in the USA. The results also indicate that higher-quality governance appears valuable with financial analysts during pre- and post-crisis period, while it is not generally detected in COVID-19 times. However, we report the weakness of analysts’ outputs–governance quality for small firms. Thus, our findings cast doubts over the corporate governance-based analyst practices of US small and unaffiliated firms. The main implication of these findings is to improve understanding of how investors’ behavioral characteristics affect the transmission mechanism of information in money market and capital market prices. This paper has important implications for the decision making of financial analysts and investors by requesting firms to significantly improve their information environments in the good and bad times. It also offers insights into how firms establishing good corporate governance mechanisms can help the analysts to predict future stock prices.