Essays on the influence of corporate governance on financial analysts' forecast-related judgments

This thesis combines three related studies investigating if and how corporate governance generally, and managerial power particularly, influences analysts' earnings forecast and asset allocation recommendations. The study also contributes to understanding the recent mixed results in the corporate governance literature about the association between corporate governance mechanisms and future firm performance. As the number of corporate scandals making the headlines has increased in recent years, anecdotal evidence has suggested that investors and regulators increasingly view effective corporate governance as crucial to mitigating the agency problem. However, while the positive characteristics of effective corporate governance are well documented in the accounting literature, some recent studies have yielded mixed results. This thesis contributes to the corporate governance literature in accounting in several ways. The first two papers demonstrate that corporate governance scores provided by a third party significantly influences analysts earnings forecast and asset allocations. Further, the first paper documents that though the UK and US have similar Anglo legal regimes, the same corporate governance ratings results in very different effects of corporate governance on UK and US analysts forecasts. The third paper attempts to help resolve some of the mixed results in recent corporate governance studies by focusing on managerial power as an antecedent to other corporate governance mechanisms, and demonstrating how high levels of managerial power coupled with misalignment of the manager and shareholders' incentives can negatively impacts analysts' forecasts.