Engagement in earnings conference calls

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Rennekamp, Kristina M.; Sethuraman, Mani; Steenhoven, Blake A.
• 署名单位: Cornell University; Queens University - Canada
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING & ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0165-4101
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jacceco.2022.101498
• 发表日期: 2022
• 关键词: information-content; empirical-analysis; LANGUAGE USE; analysts; BEHAVIOR

摘要

Research on conference calls documents that the question and answer (Q&A) portion is informative to markets. However, prior studies focus on the attributes of the participating individuals, primarily managers and analysts. We instead use the conversation as our unit of analysis, and examine whether conversational engagement between managers and ana-lysts in earnings calls is informative to market participants. Using an experiment, we first demonstrate that linguistic style matching (LSM), a form of verbal coordination, is a reasonable empirical proxy for conversational engagement. We next use a quasi -experiment to confirm that investors can detect differences in engagement. Finally, using a hand-collected archival dataset comprised of audio recordings and textual tran-scripts from over 2400 earnings calls, we show that LSM in manager-analyst conversations during the Q&A is positively associated with absolute stock returns during the conversa-tion, suggesting that conversations with greater engagement are more informative to capital markets and facilitate price formation.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.