Key takeaways
- Analysts’ identities were anonymized for forecasts of non-U.S. companies, but not for U.S. companies
- The anonymization started in 2017, earlier than I/B/E/S disclosed, so more data is affected than originally thought
- Contrary to claims, there was no wide-scale scrambling of analysts’ IDs in recent years that would undermine research
- The paper offers a method to uncover some anonymized analysts by cross-referencing with the largely unaffected analyst recommendations data
The concern
Researchers worried that Refinitiv was anonymizing analyst identifiers in the I/B/E/S database, potentially undermining decades of academic research that relies on tracking individual analysts over time.
What we found
Contrary to concerns, we find no evidence of large-scale ID anonymization or reshuffling for annual and quarterly EPS forecasts for U.S. firms. The database remains reliable for research purposes.
We provide Stata codes to help researchers reverse engineer missing analyst IDs and a linking table for matching broker IDs across different I/B/E/S files.
Practical resources
For researchers working with I/B/E/S data, see our step-by-step tutorial: How to match I/B/E/S vintage without the landmines.
We update this analysis annually. The most recent update (2025) is available via the links above.
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