The Information Content of Accounting Disclosures for Forecasting Sales of Manufacturing Firms
40 Pages Posted: 17 Sep 2011 Last revised: 26 Jul 2012
Date Written: July 25, 2012
Abstract
We identify accounting disclosures of manufacturing firms that may be useful for forecasting year-ahead sales and develop a forecasting model incorporating these disclosures. We find that the most useful disclosures are prior sales growth, days sales outstanding, employees, margin and order backlog. We find that our forecasting model incorporating these disclosures provides forecasting ability incremental to that from analysts’ forecasts alone. In return-based tests, we find that a strategy of buying (selling) the 20% of firms with the largest positive (negative) difference between the model-based sales growth forecasts and analysts’ sales growth forecasts results in an annualized risk-adjusted return of 6.04%. The pattern of these returns is consistent with analysts over-extrapolating prior sales growth and markets discovering the analysts’ errors during the subsequent year, and with our model identifying firms where this has occurred. We conclude that the information in accounting disclosures about future sales is not fully impounded in analysts’ forecasts or in stock prices.
Keywords: Sales Forecasting, Accounting Disclosures, Analysts Forecasts
JEL Classification: M41, G14
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Can Investors Profit from the Prophets? Consensus Analyst Recommendations and Stock Returns
By Brad M. Barber, Reuven Lehavy, ...
-
Security Analysts' Career Concerns and Herding of Earnings Forecasts
By Jeffrey D. Kubik, Amit Solomon, ...
-
By Patricia Dechow, Amy P. Hutton, ...
-
Analyzing the Analysts: When Do Recommendations Add Value?
By Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Joonghyuk Kim, ...
-
An Empirical Analysis of Analysts' Target Prices: Short Term Informativeness and Long Term Dynamics
By Alon Brav and Reuven Lehavy
-
How Do Analysts Use Their Earnings Forecasts in Generating Stock Recommendations?