I am pleased to offer comments on the paper “Diversified firms and analyst earnings forecast: The role of management guidance at the segment level” (André, Filip, and Moldovan 2019), which I discussed at the 2018 international conference of the Journal of International Accounting Research (JIAR) held in Venice, Italy. The authors, using a manually collected dataset, investigate the role of segment-level guidance (SLG) on a sample of diversified European firms. One of the main empirical results show that analysts are enabled to make better forecasts when firms provide SLG.
I believe the paper makes a significant contribution to current literature and fits very well into the scope of JIAR. The authors manage to tie together different streams of literature on management forecast, diversification, and segment reporting (IFRS 8). In doing so, they also provide hints for identifying further research questions. The next sections discuss two research topics...
