재무분석가의 이익예측치와 회계이익의 구성요소간의 관련성에 관한 연구: 감사품질의 영향을 중심으로

Analysts play an important role as information intermediaries in the capital market. Since analysts' forecast earnings fundamentally based on firm's accounting earnings, it is important to know how analysts' forecasts reflect property of earnings components, and how analysts consider audit quality in forecasting earnings. This paper examines whether analysts' forecasts reflect differential persistence of earnings components and, especially, whether the degree of reflection is changed with audit quality. The results are as follows. Analysts more reflect earnings components in their forecasts for firms with higher audit quality than for those with lower audit quality. This result was not changed in most of cases even after accruals were decomposed into discretionary accruals and non-discretionary accruals. These result indicate that analysts use firms' earnings with high audit quality as reliable information. Second, analysts reflect differential property between accruals and operating cash flow. However, although discretionary accruals are less persistent than non-discretionary accruals, analysts do not discriminate discretionary accruals from non-discretionary accruals. This result is consistent with that of Ahmed et al. (2005).