How Country-Level Corporate Governance Impacts Information Environment. Using a New Model with More Forecast Properties
Christopher von Koch, Ola Nilsson, Micael Jönsson

Abstract
Financial analyst forecast properties are often used to measure the information environment (IE) within which firms operate. The three most common analyst proxies for IE are analyst following, analyst forecast accuracy, and analyst forecast dispersion. Research using these forecast properties indicates that country-level corporate governance (CCG) positively affects IE. However, consider that analyst properties are determined by both public and private information and that these proxies do not enable determining these two dimensions; even so, they can be interpreted as a rough proxy for IE, in particular because there are models that measure the proportion and precision of private information, the precision of public information and the precision of total information using analyst data. We claim that it is especially important to understand these dimensions and that the relationship between CCG and IE has not been fully investigated. The aim of this paper is therefore to investigate this relationship more thoroughly using a new model as a proxy for firms’ IE. We use a worldwide sample, and our results show that higher levels of CCG significantly and positively affect IE. Greater CCG improves the precision of both public and total information. Additionally, our results indicate that precision in private information is unaffected by greater CCG and that analysts use relatively less private information in their forecasts with increased CCG. We can therefore conclude a generally positive relationship between CCG and IE with improved public information.

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