Racial bias in analyst forecasts

Does Wall Street discriminate by race? That’s the title of a recent US study examining 97,000 analyst price targets over a 15-year period.

And the answer? Yes.

When a company announces bad earnings news, analysts are more likely to issue pessimistic price targets when the firm’s chief executive officer (CEO) is other than white, according to the paper. It found price targets for non-white CEO firms reflect more than four times more pessimism per dollar of negative earnings news.

It turns out these lower price targets are “economically unjustified”. As a result, the study notes, companies headed by non-white CEOs are more likely to exceed their price targets in the upcoming period.