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...

We use facial emotion recognition software to quantify CEO mood. Anger or disgust motivates a CEO to work harder to improve his/her situation thus firm profitability improves in the subsequent quarter. Happy CEOs are less likely to work on hard or unpleasant tasks thus profitability decreases in...

This study examines whether the “soft” information present in merger and acquisition announcement press releases contains incrementally valuable news relative to traditional “hard” data and analyst generated information. We use Diction, a textual-analysis program, to construct measures...

Quarterly earnings conference calls convey fundamental information, as well as manager and analyst opinion about the firm. We examine how market uncertainty regarding firm valuation is affected by conference call tones. Using textual analysis of all publicly available earnings calls (2002-2012)...

Using content analysis we measure the impact of soft information, derived from words in IPO registration documents, on IPO pricing efficiency. First, using 2,298 U.S. IPOs from 1996 to 2008, we find that an IPO document's strategic tone correlates positively with the stock's first-day return;...