Graduation Year
2021
Date of Submission
5-2021
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Economics-Accounting
Reader 1
George Batta
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
2021 Patrick C Chen
Abstract
Equity analysts adjust GAAP earnings to report non-GAAP figures that they believe better represent a firm’s current and future performance. The importance of such non-GAAP(street) figures has been determined and accepted by the literature, but the process in which analysts arrive at such figures is less understood. I apply a newly defined measure of firm complexity using text based analysis of firm annual reports and investigate its effect. When complexity increases, it becomes harder to individuate different components of a system. When that system is a firm, complexity then increases the difficulty in determining an accurate measure of performance. The effect of this type of firm characteristic on analysts has yet to be explored. I find that firms with higher complexity exhibit a greater difference between GAAP earnings and analyst adjusted non-GAAP earnings. A cross sectional test featuring earnings volatility is also found to increase the marginal effect of complexity on the difference. This suggests that firm complexity plays an important role in influencing an analyst’s decision to adjust GAAP earnings.
Recommended Citation
Chen, Patrick, "Analyst Non-GAAP Reporting: When Do Equity Analysts Adjust GAAP Earnings – an Application of Text Based Firm Complexity" (2021). CMC Senior Theses. 2737.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2737
