The impact of analyst sentiment on UK stock recommendations and target prices

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between narrative sentiment in analysts' company reports and their recommendation and target price outputs. We study an industry-balanced sample of 275 UK quoted company sell-side analyst reports over the period 2006-2010 using a content analysis methodology to measure net sentiment for a range of themes. We then model analysts' outputs against themed sentiment scores to analyse the impact of the Global Financial Crisis. We find that themed sentiments impact upon analysts' outputs, but their magnitude and direction vary over the pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis periods. In particular, before the crisis we find a strong negative relationship between the macroeconomic and regulatory environment and report outputs, though this effect diminishes somewhat with the onset of the crisis, to be restored thereafter. Growth sentiment exerts a weak positive impact before the crisis which disappears thereafter. Financial performance sentiment becomes a significant positive driver of outputs following the crisis. There is evidently a "back to basics" approach following the crisis which restores financial fundamentals to the heart of stock analysis. Our findings provide some insight into the thought processes of analysts by identifying the dynamic relation between analysts' outputs and themed sentiments

A Summary of Developments in Accounting Education in the United States 1990–2015

The article examines the consequential long-term professional experience of the reforms of higher education in accounting in the United States, which started in the sixties of the last century and is continuing today. This is the joined efforts of non-governmental associations, first and foremost, the American Association of Accountants (AAA) and accountants-academic theorists as well as accountants practitioners. The article considers the publications of leading scientists, who have summarised the experience in the development of the profession and who showed the directions of its development. Particular attention is paid to the conclusion that today an accountant must possess a broad cultural base in the framework of preparation for the professional career in public accounting, industrial accounting or teaching accounting. This article suggests some ways in which accountants can adapt to their rapidly changing working environment. The attention is drawn to the fact that the constant improvement of the effectiveness of the curriculum should be based on the structure of the curriculum, derived from a set of clearly defined goals. The authors of this publication refer the readers to specific articles, which contain the examples of curriculum structure that includes the business core, the core of accounting and the area of specialization of an accounting specialist

'Presenting' the past: perspectives on time for accounting and management history

Concepts of time in accounting and management historiography have only previously been considered as partial subsets of other methodological issues. This paper investigates our concepts of historical time with a view to offering alternative foundations to the unidirectional linear concept of chronological time employed in historical research project design and execution. Its analytical approach is pluralist in that it draws upon the historiographic writings of historians and historical theorists of traditional and post-modern persuasions, both within and beyond the accounting and management history fields. It addresses teleological, historicist and narrativist temporal underpinnings and considers historical practice in relation to assumptions about and interpretations of continuity and discontinuity. Time is extended beyond its conventional accounting and management chronology to include consideration of co-present, cyclical, relativist, structuralist and spatial time. Intrinsic and reflexive relationships between past, present and future are explored. The paper argues for a postmodern pluralisation of our historiographic approaches to time and their informing revisitations of historical accounting and management subjects with a view to better understanding that which we thought we already knew.time, historiography, past, present, future, continuity, discontinuity,