Working from home cost Wall Street analysts some of their edge. Analysts who had enjoyed easy in-person access to company managers, investors and other informed people became noticeably worse at forecasting earnings once COVID lockdowns sent them home, and the gap closed again after restrictions lifted.
The study is by Michael Durney of the University of Iowa, Hoyoun Kyung of the University of Missouri, Stanimir Markov of the University of Texas at Dallas and Jihwon Park of Baruch College, City University of New York. Titled “Forecasting Earnings from Home”, it was published online in Management Science on February 9, 2026.
Measuring access by distance
The researchers hand-collected the locations of U.S. sell-side analysts from LinkedIn profiles and brokerage directories. They then measured how close each analyst sat to four kinds of informed parties: the management of the companies they covered, other analysts following the same firm, institutional investors holding the stock, and local subject-matter experts, proxied by the share of college graduates in the analyst’s metro area.
Their final sample covered 220,992 quarterly earnings forecasts by 1,392 analysts on 3,175 firms, spanning eight quarters before and eight after local lockdown dates. Because lockdowns began on different dates in different states, the team could compare changes in accuracy for analysts with more and less in-person access while controlling for analyst, firm and time effects.
The local advantage vanished
Before the pandemic, analysts within 100 kilometers of a company’s headquarters made more accurate forecasts, matching earlier research. After lockdown, their accuracy dropped more than that of distant analysts. In dollar terms, the average forecast error rose by $0.012 per share for nearby analysts, about half the local accuracy advantage documented in earlier work.
Proximity to more peer analysts, more institutional investors and more educated workers each carried a similar penalty once offices closed. When all four measures were tested together, losing access to company management and to buy-side investors mattered most.
The effect showed up beyond quarterly earnings, too. Revenue forecasts, target prices, market reactions to stock recommendations and longer-term earnings forecasts all suffered more for analysts who had relied on face-to-face contact.
Stars hit hardest
The decline was larger for All-Star analysts, suggesting that the top names relied more heavily on in-person meetings. Analysts with long experience covering a particular firm were partly protected, but general experience did not help.
Bigger brokerages, with presumably better technology, were not spared. And as companies began enforcing return-to-office policies, accuracy for the most affected analysts gradually recovered to pre-lockdown levels between the ninth and eleventh quarters after lockdown began.
The authors also checked that the results were not simply driven by analysts living in large, heavily restricted cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York or San Francisco.
Their conclusion is pointed: despite advances in communications technology, AI and machine learning, in-person interactions remain “a unique and difficult to substitute information channel” for sell-side research, and remote work impeded the flow of information in capital markets.
Study Details:
- Title: Forecasting Earnings from Home
- Authors: Michael Durney, Hoyoun Kyung, Stanimir Markov, Jihwon Park
- Journal: Management Science
- Publication Date: February 9, 2026
- DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2024.04637