The optimism and accuracy of bank-affiliated analysts’ forecasts

ABSTRACT This paper studies the effect of commercial bank affiliation on analysts’ forecasts using the Korean data over the 2000–2015 period. We find that the median EPS forecast error of 2.88% made by independent analysts is significantly larger than the median error of 2.47% made by bank-affiliated analysts. The difference in the optimism and accuracy of independent vs. bank-affiliated analysts is significant only for non-chaebol companies. We also find that capital markets respond to more positively (or more negatively) to stock recommendation changes that bank-affiliated analysts make and that the responses are larger for non-chaebol companies. The results are consistent with our conjecture that bank-affiliated analysts make more informative forecasts by sharing the information generated by commercial banks under bank conglomerates, their information advantage is salient for non-chaebol companies, and capital markets give value to the information advantage.