Does Time-Space Compression Affect Analysts’ Forecast Performance?

Abstract

Through the difference-in-differences (DID) methodology, we find that the connection of China’s high-speed railway (HSR) as an exogenous shock could improve analysts’ forecast performance, leading to more accurate forecasts, decrease the dispersion between analysts, stimulate more forecast revisions with less revision volatility, evidenced by analyst site visits to firms. The results are robust with a battery of robustness checks such as 2SLS regression and so on. And the counterfactual relations caused by the lightning accident in 2011 also confirm our previous assumption. Furthermore, when the local economic development is weak, the trips by HSR is more convenient, or the information environment of firms are weak, the correlations will be stronger. Moreover, the connection of HSR also improves the information availability of stock recommendations issued by analysts. Overall, our study contributes to the relevant study of sell-side analysts’ performance and has an important impact on studying the role of geographic proximity on information efficiency.