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| Does Stable Relationship with Customers Improve the Analyst Forecasts about Suppliers? |
| WANG Xiongyuan, PENG Xuan
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| School of Accounting, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law |
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Abstract Focusing on a firm’s customer characteristics and following the customer may improve the quantity and quality of the analysts’ information on the covered firm, thus may enhance the analyst’s forecast accuracy. The empirical evidence based on “firm-level” analysis shows that both the analysts’ forecast error and dispersion of a supplier firm are significant negative with the firm’s stable relationship with its customers. Further analysis shows that, the above positive effects are more prominent when the supplier produces nondurable goods, has a weaker position in the industry, sell higher goods to the stable customers or has a good relationship with customers. And the impact of the stable relationship with customers on analyst forecasts behavior may derives from the effect that the stable relationship can bring higher profitability and profitability persistence. All of these results suggest that stable customers are an important information source of the analysts. Even through don’t follow a covered firm’s customer, the stable relationship with customers may also improve the analyst forecasts, consistent with the “signaling effects”. The empirical evidence based on “firm-analyst-level” analysis show that compared with the analysts who do not following a covered firm’s customer, analysts who followed provide more accurate earnings forecasts for the supplier firm. And this positive relationship exists only in the stable relationship group. What’s more, in the subsample which the analysts follow the covered firm’s customer, the analysts’ forecast error is negative with the stable relationship. All of these results imply that following a covered firm’s customer does provide some material incremental information, consistent with the “supply chain knowledge spillover effects”. Based on these finds, our study may enrich the customer and analyst literatures.
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Received: 06 May 2015
Published: 12 April 2018
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