Risk forecasting is crucial for informed investment decision-making. Moreover, the salience of investment risk increases during economically uncertain times. In this paper, we study how sell-side analysts form expectations of firm risk, under different macroeconomic conditions (low versus high uncertainty) and by distinguishing between quantitative and qualitative information inputs. We find that analysts jointly consider quantitative and qualitative information, but that their reliance on qualitative information—in particular, disclosure tone—increases when macroeconomic uncertainty is high. We also find that analysts mostly rely on disclosure tone when it contradicts quantitative information. These findings highlight how narrative disclosures can provide context for quantitative information. Finally, we find that analysts' specific use of quantitative/qualitative information improves their forecasts as predictors of firm risk. Together, our results illuminate analysts' risk forecasting process—what information they use and how.

We examine whether U.K. managers use the flexibility provided under the partial method for deferred taxes to measure unrecognized deferred taxes opportunistically. We first test whether firm-specific operational and opportunistic factors are associated with the level of unrecognized deferred taxes. The tests provide evidence certain U.K. managers opportunistically measure deferred taxes to manage leverage, consistent with arguments by commentators that deferred taxes heavily influence leverage indicators that play a prominent role in the U.K. contracting framework. Because the proper identification and measurement of both operational and opportunistic determinants of unrecognized deferred taxes influence our tests, we additionally investigate whether unrecognized taxes relate to future deferred tax reversals and future operating profitability of the firm. These tests show the components of deferred taxes predict both future deferred tax reversals and indicators of future profitability of the firm as predicted. Taken together, our results indicate that, on average, the existence of balance sheet management does not nullify the predictive power of (unrecognized) deferred taxes for future deferred tax reversals and for profitability measures. One implication of the results is that the recent U.K. standard change eliminating the partial provision method for deferred taxes potentially has reduced the usefulness of deferred tax disclosures.