Accounting standards and analysts' forecasts: the impact of FRS3 on analysts' ability to forecast EPS

This paper assesses the impact of the UK Financial Reporting Standard 3 (FRS3) "Reporting Financial Performance" on the ability of analysts to predict companies' future earnings per share. FRS3 requires companies to publish a wider information set than before, to help users to appraise current performance and to form an opinion of future levels of performance. Our findings suggest that although in the first year of FRS3 there was some confusion over definitions, so that analysts' forecast errors increased, in following years the additional information provided by FRS3 increased the accuracy of analysts' forecasts.