In contrast to the disappearing dividends view prevalent in the literature, we document extensive dividend payments by firms and significant variability within firms and across 16 countries during 2000–2013. We predict that within-firm variability in dividends increases investor demand for forward-looking dividend information, and analysts respond by producing informative dividend forecasts. We find that analyst dividend forecasts are available for most dividend-paying firms and are more prevalent for firms with higher variability of dividends. Analyst dividend forecasts are more accurate than alternative proxies based on extrapolations of past dividends. Finally, dividend forecasts (1) are incrementally useful to investors beyond information in other fundamentals, such as earnings and cash flow forecasts, (2) help investors interpret earnings quality, and (3) are associated with investors' portfolio allocation decisions. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Research suggesting the existence of the accrual anomaly runs into the issue that risk serves as a competing explanation for abnormal returns. This paper proposes a novel approach to distinguish between risk and anomaly explanations for the negative association between accruals and returns. The intuition is that high-risk stocks should experience relatively high and low returns more often than low-risk stocks. Thus, a variable that has the opposite correlations with high returns than with low returns is unlikely to capture risk, which points toward an anomaly. The paper implements this perspective via two logistic regressions predicting relatively high and low returns. Controlling for standard risk measures, we document that low accruals increase the probability of large positive returns, but reduce the likelihood of large negative returns. This finding is inconsistent with the prediction that accruals reflect risk and supports the hypothesis that the accrual “anomaly” is indeed an anomaly.

Using an international sample of 16 countries, this paper examines if analyst- and country-specific characteristics explain the variation in target price (TP) accuracy. We find that significant variation in average TP accuracy across countries is due to differences in accounting disclosure quality, the origin of the legal system, cultural traits, and IFRS regulation. We also find that analysts exhibit differential and persistent ability to forecast target prices accurately, which confirms that some analysts have superior TP forecasting ability. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources indicated in the text.