Gender Diversity Of Analyst Teams And Earnings Forecasting Performance

By collecting,analyzing and disseminating value information related to market participants,financial analysts make a profoundly influence investors' investment decisions and the allocation of resources in the capital market,and play an important role in the capital market.In view of the increasing complexity of the stock market,the analyst team has greater information advantages than individual analysts,which has wider range of information sources,more timely collection of information,more comprehensive analysis of information,etc.Investors and brokers also see and value these information advantage.Therefore,more and more analysts are adopting the teamwork approach,and more and more research reports are the result of teamwork.Inconsistent with the actual background and future trends,the existing literature does not give sufficient attention to analyst team which is an important research sample.For domestic and foreign scholars,it is still a "black box" that how the analyst team makes predictions and how the analyst team's prediction quality is affected.From the perspective of gender diversity of analyst teams,this paper studies the impact of gender diversity of analyst teams on the quality of earnings forecasts,and initially explores the earnings forecasts quality of analyst teams and their influencing factors.This paper uses the analysts' earnings forecast data of China's capital market from 2007 to 2017 as a research sample to empirically test the effect of gender diversity of analyst teams on the quality of earnings forecasts.The study found that,compared with the same gender analyst teams,the earnings forecast of the gender heterogeneous analyst team is more accurate and the optimistic bias is lower.The results of the cross-sectional analysis show that,from the perspective of analyst characteristics,the promotion effect of the gender diversity of the analyst teams on the quality of earnings forecasts is more significant in the highly educated analyst team or the experienced analyst team;from the perspective of the brokers characteristics,the promotion effect of the gender diversity of the analyst teams on the quality of earnings forecasting is more significant in brokers with fewer star analysts or smaller size;from the perspective of corporate characteristics,the promotion effect of the gender diversity of the analyst teams on the quality of earnings forecasting is more significant in firms with non-Big 4 audits or lower analyst attention.Further research found that compared with the separate work,the female analysts who work in the form of teamwork significantly improved the accuracy of earnings forecast;secondly,when the same gender analyst team transforms into a gender heterogeneous team,theanalyst team has higher prediction accuracy and less optimistic bias after gender structure changing.Our paper found that the gender diversity of the analyst team significantly improves the quality of earnings forecasts.This conclusion has certain enlightenment and practical significance for brokers and investors.