Considerable debate exists about what analyst experience measures and whether analysts learn
from their experiences. Extant research has argued that once innate ability is considered, analysts’
general and firm-specific experiences are not relevant to understanding their forecasting performance.
We argue that measures of experience need to be expanded to also include task-specific experience.
Our results reveal that analysts’ forecast accuracy is associated with both their innate ability and
task-specific experience. In addition, we find that forecast accuracy and task-specific experience are
most highly correlated for those analysts who survive the longest and, thus, presumably have the
greatest innate abilities.