An Examination of First Call's Company Issued Guidance Database

This paper examines the accuracy and consistency of coding variables in the Company Issued Guidance (CIG) database issued by First Call. Specifically, we examine “CIG Code” - a variable used by First Call to describe the type of guidance issued by management (point, range, or qualitative), and “CIG Description Code” - a variable indicating the direction of the earnings guidance (positive, negative, or neutral). Our examination reveals extensive misclassification errors for these variables. In particular, the errors for CIG description code are of such a magnitude that we recommend researchers not to rely on this variable when employing the First Call's CIG database.