현금흐름지속성이 재무분석가의 현금흐름예측에 미치는 영향

초록

Financial analysts provide useful predictions for investment decisions of capital market participants based on knowledge and diverse information gained through training as information intermediaries. So financial analysts play an important role of mitigating information asymmetry between the internal and external side of companies. Market participants are not only interested in the financial analysts’ forecasts, who have information superiority over them, but also demand more diverse information from them, with the recent fast-changing corporate environment. This is evident from the fact that analysts who provided predictions focusing on sales and earnings in the past, have recently diversified their prediction variables and provide additional information on areas such as goal stock prices and cash flows. The aims of this study are to examine whether financial analysts tend to provide cash flow forecasts if a company has higher cash flow persistence, and analyze the effects of cash flow persistence on accuracy and error of financial analysts’ cash flow predictions. The results show that financial analysts provide cash flow predictions when there is higher cash flow persistence. Also, cash flow prediction accuracy is found to be higher when there is higher cash flow persistence. Uncertainty of predictions decreases with higher cash flow persistence, in which case the financial analyst is found not to make aggressive cash flow forecasts. In additional analysis, we find that there are more analysts following who try to provide future cash flow when there is higher cash flow persistence. The evidence shows that financial analysts use cash flow persistence as a more important source of information than earnings persistence when forecasting future cash flows. These results imply that financial analysts use cash flow persistence as the most basic and important source of information when predicting cash flows.

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