This paper examines how overconfidence affects the properties of management forecasts. Using both the “over‐optimism” and “miscalibration” dimensions of overconfidence to generate our predictions, we examine three research questions. First, we examine whether overconfidence increases the likelihood of issuing a forecast. Second, we examine whether overconfidence increases the amount of optimism in management forecasts. Third, we examine whether overconfidence increases the precision of the forecast. Using both options‐ and press‐based measures to proxy for individual overconfidence, we find support for all three research questions.

This paper employs the firm life‐cycle concept to extend our understanding of the mispricing of accrual and cash flow information by the stock market. We find that accruals and free cash flows are strongly (negatively) correlated in the maturity and decline stages of a firm's life cycle but not in the growth stage, suggesting that they capture unique information in the growth stage of the firm's life cycle but more correlated information in the later stages. Consistent with this finding, we show that the cash flows anomaly subsumes the accruals anomaly in maturity and decline stages, but not in the growth stage. Our findings contribute to the debate regarding the overlap between the two anomalies.