Analysts’ Characteristics and Forecast ability–An Empirical Study from China’s A-Share Market

Using a sample earnings forecast from China’s A-Share Market over the 5 years from 2016 to 2020, This article finds that analysts’ characteristics are related to their forecast ability. Specifically, analysts’ gender conditional on educational background and experience significantly affects their forecast ability. This paper also investigates the relationship between analysts’ effort, attention, and forecast ability and finds effort has a positive relationship with accuracy and relative accuracy but is negatively associated with optimism. Attention also has positively related to accuracy and optimism.