The Impact Of Neurotic Personality Traits On Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts

In view of the important role of analysts’ earnings forecast in the capital market,many researchers have conducted a lot of research on it,so far,the studies of analysts’earnings forecasts are mainly divided into three aspects:the research of the effectiveness of the earnings forecasts,the research of the tendency of the earnings forecasts and the research of the factors affecting the earnings forecasts.As for the study of the factors affecting the earnings forecasts,previous studies usually explore the factors from the perspective of the analyst and the company.Those factors including gender,education,experience,reputation and other personal characteristics that can be observed,but not for the unobservable features such as the personality traits,the personality traits has a profound and far-reaching influence on the behavior of the individual.Therefore,we try to explore the impact of analysts’ personality traits on earnings forecast.Due to the implicit nature of personality,we can not characterize it through external observation.Psychologists usually use the questionnaire to carry on the analysis,however,it is susceptible to noise,respondents are likely not to make the true expression,and it cannot objectively reflect their personality traits.Freud,a famous psychologist.believes that the long-term behavior of people is their subconscious reaction,which is the true expression of the individual.Therefore,we should capture and depict the personality traits from the subconscious behavior of individual.There are researches shows that the social network behavior of individual will reveal themselves inadvertently,later,scholars further found that there is significant relation between personality traits and Facebook behavior,recently,scholars found that neurotic individuals like to publish their personal information in the Facebook,such as photos,phone number,email address.What is more,scholars founded that the photo on the resume can correctly reveal the personality traits of the candidate.The research shows that the performance of individual in the social network reflects individual’s personality traits,which means that we can qualitatively describe the personality traits by the behavior in their social network.Based on the research results of psychology,we describe the personality traits of the analyst from their unconsciously expression,and then study the influence of personality traits on their earnings forecast.The results show that the higher the neuroticism is,the greater the deviation of earnings forecast is,the lower the accuracy of the earnings forecast is,the more the optimism and the boldness of the earnings forecast is.In addition,other personal characteristics such as gender,education and that whether he is a famous analyst or not have no significant impact on the earnings forecasts.The analyst’s experience is positively correlated with the accuracy of earnings forecasts and negatively with the optimism and the boldness.