We examine whether attribution bias leads managers who have experienced short-term forecasting success to become overconfident in their ability to forecast future earnings. Importantly, this form of overconfidence is endogenous and dynamic. We also examine the effect of this cognitive bias on the managerial credibility. Consistent with the existence of dynamic overconfidence, managers who have predicted earnings accurately in the previous four quarters are less accurate in their subsequent earnings predictions. These managers also display greater divergence from the analyst consensus and are more precise. Lastly, investors and analysts react less strongly to forecasts issued by overconfident managers.

Following the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, self-regulated peer reviews at accounting firms were replaced by independent inspections conducted by the Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board. Critics of self-regulation had argued that the peer review program lacked credibility. This paper tests whether the opinions issued by the peer reviewers provided credible information to clients about audit firm quality. We find audit firms gained clients after receiving clean opinions from their reviewers and lost clients after receiving modified or adverse opinions. This suggests peer review opinions provided credible information about quality differences between audit firms.

Human estimation and inference are subject to systematic biases such as overconfidence and over-optimism. In contrast to prior research that has identified multiple negative consequences of these biases, we focus on positive effects. We empirically examine a setting in which over-optimism a) is a related but different bias from overconfidence, b) emerges dynamically in a rational economic framework, and c) generates higher managerial effort. Importantly, this additional effort improves firm profitability and market value.