We evaluate the effect of online versus in-person visits on analysts’ forecast performance. Our results show that online visits significantly improve the timeliness of analysts’ forecasts but have a negative impact on their quality, as evidenced by inferior forecast thoroughness and accuracy. We further document that the positive association between online visits and forecast timeliness is stronger when the cost of analysts traveling to visited firms is high. The negative association between online visits and forecast quality is stronger for firms with more complex information and fewer managers interacting with analysts. In addition, we find that managers’ communication style is more cautious and more vague when interacting online, indicating that issues of trust worsen the online communication environment. We also find that, in contrast to nonvisits, online visits provide analysts with an idiosyncratic informational advantage. Overall, our results provide an empirical evaluation of the economic consequences of analysts’ online versus in-person visits.
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