Voluntary disclosure: Empirical analysis of the tone used in conference calls

Abstract

The study aims to perform the following two analyses for understanding the effect of a voluntary disclosure: 1) whether a company's performance is related to its voluntary disclosure in a conference call; and 2) whether the voluntary information is related to the future results of Brazilian companies. The tone of Brazilian firms with American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) (American Depositary Receipts) in the US market was measured between 2002 and 2016. The tone of managers was calculated in English using the original dictionary proposed by Loughran and McDonald (2011), as well as an adapted version in Portuguese. The findings suggest a positive relation between the tone used by managers during conference call and firms' current and future performance.