COVID-19 pandemic, limited attention, and analyst forecast dispersion

Jinjin Zhang, Jinyu Wu, Yalin Luo, Ziyan Huang and Ruzhen He

Finance Research Letters, 2022, vol. 50, issue C

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on analysts’ forecast dispersion. We find that analysts’ exposure to the COVID-19 lockdown reduces the dispersion of their forecasts. Along with the forecast dispersion, the number of earnings forecasts issued by treated analysts decreases, supporting the channel of attention distraction. Moreover, there is no significant difference between optimistic and pessimistic forecasts, against the explanation of risk attitude change. We find our conclusion is robust to a staggered DID model and numerous robustness tests. Our finding contributes to the dispute regarding the pandemic's effect on analyst forecast behavior.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Analysts’ forecast dispersion; Limited attention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612322005013
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finlet:v:50:y:2022:i:c:s1544612322005013

DOI: 10.1016/j.frl.2022.103322

Access Statistics for this article

Finance Research Letters is currently edited by R. Gençay

More articles in Finance Research Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().