The information role of earnings conference call tone: evidence from stock price crash risk

This paper investigates whether and how the disclosure tone of earnings conference calls predicts future stock price crash risk. Using US public firms’ conference call transcripts from 2010 to 2015, we find that firms with less optimistic tone of year-end conference calls experience higher stock pri...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Fu, Xi (Author) ; Wu, Xiaoxi (Author) ; Zhang, Zhifang (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2021
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2021, Volume: 173, Issue: 3, Pages: 643-660
Further subjects:B G30
B G10
B G12
B Earnings conference calls
B G14
B M41
B Truthful communication
B Ethical financial reporting
B Tone
B Aufsatz in Zeitschrift
B Voluntary Disclosure
B Stock price crash risk
B D80
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Description
Summary:This paper investigates whether and how the disclosure tone of earnings conference calls predicts future stock price crash risk. Using US public firms’ conference call transcripts from 2010 to 2015, we find that firms with less optimistic tone of year-end conference calls experience higher stock price crash risk in the following year. Additional analyses reveal that the predictive power of tone is more pronounced among firms with better information environment and lower managerial equity incentives, suggesting that extrinsic motivations for truthful disclosure partially explain the predictive power of conference call tone. Our results shed light on the long-term information role of conference call tone by exploring the setting of extreme future downside risk, when managers have conflicting incentives either to unethically manipulate disclosure tone to hide bad news or to engage in ethical and truthful communication.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-019-04326-1