Earnings Conference Call Content and Stock Price: The Case of REITs

Using computer based content analysis, we quantify the linguistic tone of quarterly earnings conference calls for publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). After controlling for the earnings announcement, we examine the relation between conference call tone and the contemporaneous stock price reaction. We find that the tone of the conference call dialogue has significant explanatory power for the abnormal returns at and immediately following quarterly earnings announcements. The question and answer portion of the conference calls dominates prepared managerial introductory remarks in explanatory significance. Furthermore, an overall positive tone in the conference call discussion between management and analysts is found to nearly offset the damaging effects of a negative earnings surprise.     

EARNINGS CONFERENCE CALLS AND INSTITUTIONAL MONITORING: EVIDENCE FROM TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

We document the effects of institutional investors on the qualitative information disclosure of firms during earnings conference calls. Using conference call and institutional ownership data between 2005 and 2016, we find that aggregate institutional ownership dampens conference call tone. The effects of institutional investors on tone are causal based on results from indexed firms. Consistent with hypotheses regarding investors' horizons, short-term institutional investors are associated with a more positive conference call tone, as well as more opportunistic trading, whereas long-term investors are associated with a more negative tone. Market participants can generally disentangle the impact of institutional investors on tone based on investor type.     

Words versus Deeds: Evidence from Post‐Call Manager Trades

We examine the impact of conference call tones on the direction and magnitude of subsequent manager trades. Our univariate results show that corporate insiders buy company shares following negative‐tone conference calls and sell shares following positive‐tone conference calls. This inverse call tone–trading pattern holds for both managers’ introductory sessions and subsequent question‐and‐answer (Q&A) sessions. Our multivariate results confirm the univariate call tone–trading patterns and show that contrarian manager trades are mostly driven by managerial selling activity. In contrast to the consistent and strong evidence of managers trading in the opposite direction of their call tones, we find no evidence of managers trading in the same direction of their call tones. We also examine the impact of analyst Q&A challenges on post‐call manager trades. Our findings suggest that managers learn from analyst feedback and adjust their post‐call trades accordingly.     

The Power of Voice: Managerial Affective States and Future Firm Performance

We measure managerial affective states during earnings conference calls by analyzing conference call audio files using vocal emotion analysis software. We hypothesize and find that, when managers are scrutinized by analysts during conference calls, positive and negative affects displayed by managers are informative about the firm's financial future. Analysts do not incorporate this information when forecasting near‐term earnings. When making stock recommendation changes, however, analysts incorporate positive but not negative affect. This study presents new evidence that managerial vocal cues contain useful information about a firm's fundamentals, incremental to both quantitative earnings information and qualitative “soft” information conveyed by linguistic content.     

Manager-analyst conversations in earnings conference calls

Prior research finds that intraday stock prices move considerably during the discussion period of earnings conference calls. In this study, we explore what features of the manager-analyst dialogue during the discussion drive these price movements. We textually analyze the tone of managers and analysts and find that intraday prices react significantly to analyst tone, but not to management tone, for the full duration of the discussion. This effect strengthens when analyst tone is relatively negative. We then present intraday visual evidence that analysts are more neutral than managers over the call and that the tones of both parties drift downward as the call progresses. Overall, our findings illustrate how manager-analyst information exchanges evolve on earnings calls and indicate that analysts are the participants on earnings calls whose comments move stock prices during the discussion.     

Do conference calls facilitate market price discovery? Evidence from Taiwan

This study examines whether conference calls accelerate the speed at which the market and analysts understand the implications of the accrual components of current earnings on future earnings. We analyze Taiwan’s listed firms from 2001 through 2014 and find that (1) delayed market reactions to earnings news during the following 12?months occur less often for firms than for host conference calls, and (2) conference calls are associated with a significant improvement in the accuracy of analysts’ earnings forecasts. One possible explanation for our results is that conference calls improve the efficacy of investors’ and analysts’ reactions to earnings announcements by conveying information regarding the accrual components of reported earnings. Our results have implications for other Asian economies that have relatively opaque information environments and weak shareholder protections.     

Market uncertainty and the importance of media coverage at earnings announcements

We investigate whether increased investor demand for financial information arising from higher market uncertainty leads to greater media coverage of earnings announcements. We also investigate whether greater coverage during times of higher uncertainty further destabilizes financial markets because of greater attention-based trading or, alternatively, improves trading and pricing by lowering investor acquisition and interpretation costs. When uncertainty is higher, we find evidence of greater media coverage of earnings announcements and that the greater coverage leads to improvements in investor informedness, information asymmetry, and intraperiod price timeliness, and greater trade by both retail and institutional investors. In contrast to the media serving an expanded role in improving capital markets during more uncertain times, we fail to find that changes in firm-initiated disclosures lead to similar improvements and find that less frequent analyst forecast revisions exacerbate problems in capital markets during earnings announcements.     

Earnings Virality

We examine the determinants and market consequences associated with earnings announcements going viral on social media, a phenomenon we label “earnings virality.” Using a comprehensive panel of historical Twitter data, we find that the typical earnings announcement receives relatively little social media coverage, but others go viral on social media, quickly reaching the feeds of millions of people. We find that viral earnings announcements generally have Twitter content that is more extreme in tone and contains less unique content. Further, earnings virality is positively associated with revenue surprises, investor recognition, retail investor ownership, and retail investor trading around the announcement. Earnings virality appears to be detrimental to markets, as it coincides with lower market liquidity and slower price formation. Overall, our evidence suggests that user-driven dissemination through social media platforms, when amplified and taken to extreme levels, may be harmful to markets.     

The effect of conference calls on equity incentives: An empirical investigation

Conference calls have become increasingly common in recent years, yet there is little empirical evidence regarding the effect of conference calls on executive compensation. In this study, we examine the effect of voluntary disclosures on equity incentives. We hypothesize that voluntary disclosures, as measured by conference calls, affect executive compensation contracts. Using a dataset of 6263 firm-year observations from both conference call and non-conference call firms, our results are consistent with the argument that the board of directors substitutes voluntary disclosures for more costly corporate governance mechanisms. Alternatively, in firms where CEOs have less equity incentives, the owners demand more voluntary disclosures. The results of this study should be of great importance to executives and capital market participants internationally, such as investors and analysts, since we provide evidence that conference calls affect incentive based compensation contracts, which were shown in prior studies to be value relevant.     

Conference calls around merger and acquisition announcements: Do they reduce information asymmetry? UK Evidence

This paper examines conference call meetings held around merger and acquisition (M&A) announcements in the UK market. Our main findings indicate that conference calls not only facilitate the smoother transmission of M&A-related information in the stock market and smooth the rate of the information flow to the market, but also they reduce informed trading through option markets before M&A events. We also find that there is an inverse relation of analysts’ forecast error and conference call probability, that firms initiate conference calls during M&As when their transactions are large and are facing liquidity constraints, and that the probability of a firm holding a conference call around an M&A is strongly and inversely related to the existence of traded equity options on its stock.     

Linguistic Complexity in Firm Disclosures: Obfuscation or Information?

Prior research generally interprets complex language in firms’ disclosures as indicative of managerial obfuscation. However, complex language can also reflect the provision of complex information; for example, informative technical disclosure. As a consequence, linguistic complexity commingles two latent components—obfuscation and information—that are related to information asymmetry in opposite directions. We develop a novel empirical approach to estimate these two latent components within the context of quarterly earnings conference calls. We validate our estimates of these two latent components by examining their relation to information asymmetry. Consistent with our predictions, we find that our estimate of the information component is negatively associated with information asymmetry while our estimate of the obfuscation component is positively associated with information asymmetry. Our findings suggest that future research on linguistic complexity can construct more powerful tests by separately examining these two latent components of linguistic complexity.     

Ethnic Minority Analysts’ Participation in Public Earnings Conference Calls

We investigate ethnic minority and nonminority sell-side analysts’ participation in public earnings conference calls. We find that minority analysts are underrepresented in conference call Q&A sessions, and minority analysts who do participate on the calls experience lower levels of prioritization than do nonminority analysts. Minority analysts’ lower participation rates are partially but not fully mediated by characteristics such as experience, work environment, and stock rating favorability. Additionally, firm and conference call fixed effects mediate approximately half the magnitude of lower minority participation rates. Extroverted minority analysts participate at higher rates, but the negative association between minority status and conference call participation is exacerbated when calls are more time constrained, when executive teams are less diverse, and when analysts are from less prestigious brokerage houses. Overall, we document the underrepresentation of minority analysts on earnings conference calls and provide evidence suggesting both analysts’ and managers’ choices influence minority analysts’ participation rates.     

Earnings communication conferences and post-earnings-announcement drift: Evidence from China

Earnings communication conferences in China have become the main platform for direct communication between listed firms and individual investors. This study investigates whether hosting an earnings communication conference and its tone affect post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). We find that hosting an earnings communication conference increases PEAD. One possible explanation for our results is that investors overreact to the stock prices of firms that hold earnings communication conferences. We also conclude that the conference tone is negatively correlated with PEAD. In addition, the market reacts more strongly to the managers’ tone than it does to the investor's tone.     

Do pennies matter? Investor relations consequences of small negative earnings surprises

Anecdotal and survey evidence suggest that managers take actions to avoid small negative earnings surprises because they fear disproportionate, negative stock-price effects. However, empirical research has failed to document an asymmetric pricing effect. We investigate investor relations costs as an alternative incentive for managers to avoid small negative earnings surprises. Guided by CFO survey evidence from Graham et al. (J Account Econ 40:3–73, 2005), we operationalize investor relations costs using conference call characteristics—call length, call tone, and earnings forecasting propensity around the conference call. We find an asymmetric increase (decrease) in call length (forecasting propensity) for firms that miss analyst expectations by 1 cent compared with changes in adjacent 1-cent intervals. We find no statistically significant evidence that call tone is asymmetrically more negative for firms that miss expectations by a penny. While these results provide some statistical evidence to confirm managerial claims documented in Graham et al. (J Account Econ 40:3–73, 2005) regarding the asymmetrically negative effects of missing expectations, our tests do not suggest severe economic effects.     

Fixed income conference calls

We study the determinants and the informational role of firms' fixed income conference calls, a unique form of voluntary disclosure that deviates from the traditional multi-purpose firm disclosures intended for all stakeholders. We find that fixed income calls are more likely to be held by firms that have more debt, lack credit ratings or have publicly traded equity, are foreign, or are experiencing losses. In a content analysis using a sample of public firms, we find that these calls discuss debt-equity conflict events, such as share repurchases, to a greater degree relative to a matched sample of earnings conference calls. Finally, we document that credit markets react to these calls, consistent with the calls providing investors new information. Overall, these results are consistent with fixed income calls meeting the differential informational demands of debt versus equity investors.     

The Effect of Regulation FD on Transient Institutional Investors' Trading Behavior

We assess the impact of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) on the trading behavior of transient institutional investors in the quarter prior to a bad news break in a string of consecutive earnings increases. Bad news breaks are defined as breaks that are by growth firms, preceded by longer strings of consecutive earnings increases, followed by longer strings of consecutive earnings decreases, and associated with larger declines in earnings. Pre–Reg FD transient institutions have abnormal selling of stocks in the quarter immediately preceding a bad news break. This abnormal selling is confined to firms that hold conference calls in the pre–Reg FD period. However, in the post–Reg FD period transient institutions do not exhibit similar abnormal selling of stocks in the quarter before a bad news break. Furthermore, after Reg FD transient institutions allocate less of their stock portfolios to conference call firms relative to non–conference call firms in the quarters prior to a bad news break. These results demonstrate that Reg FD has had an impact on management's selective disclosure behavior and significantly changed the trading behavior of transient institutions.