Bloomberg | WFH vs RTO

Sell-side research analysts are unusual in that they are white-collar knowledge workers whose work quality is (1) public and (2) objectively measurable. So you can ask questions like “which characteristics make an analyst good,” and use publicly available information to get answers that are (1) plausibly true and (2) plausibly generalizable to other sorts of white-collar knowledge workers.

And one way to find out is of course to look at analysts’ earnings estimates.

Research from Baolian Wang and Ph.D. students Peixin Li and Jiawei Yu dives into how return to office mandates impacted equity analysts. They find “that RTO mandates significantly enhance forecast accuracy,” reducing earnings forecast errors by about 15% and also improving “forecast timeliness.” 

Read more in this story from Bloomberg.