Our sample includes all firms from selected industries (see below) with sufficient Compustat data to estimate industry-specific production-functions in any year of our five-year sample period (1993-1997)[5]. We exclude financial services and other regulated industries, such as transportation and utilities: these regulated industries are likely to have different operating environments (e.g. regulated vs. competitive), which may affect firms’ behavioral goals. The remaining industry-years represented in the sample are those with sufficient data to estimate the production frontier for that industry-year. At the frontier estimation stage, the data are tested for possible outliers
using the standardized residuals method; observations with standardized residuals in excess of two are deleted from the final dataset (Belsley et al., 1980). Data for firm-years with the required efficiency scores are matched with Compustat data for market capitalization and SIC codes, and IBES data used to calculate both analysts’ average absolute forecast errors and the variability in actual earnings over the prior five-year period.
We calculate the average forecast errors for individual analysts using forecasts of annual earnings for year tþ1 made during a 30-day forecast window immediately after the announcement of first quarter earnings for year tþ1. This choice of forecast period ensures that the individual forecasts for each firm are conditioned on the same publicly available information – the year t annual financial statements[6]. Our efficiency measures (EFFICit, ROA it, AROA it, and ROEit) are calculated using accounting data for year t, while our analyst forecast errors are based on forecasts of earnings for year tþ1. Our sample firm-years are from the sample period 1993 to 1997 that meet the following requirements: