Financial Statement Comparability and Managers’ Linguistic Choices in Conference Calls
研究发现财务报表可比性会降低电话会议中管理层的语言复杂性，且这种降低主要来自信息成分而非混淆成分，表明管理层会根据可比性策略调整披露内容。
This study examines the impact of financial statement comparability on managers’ decisions of linguistic complexity in conference calls. We find that financial statement comparability lowers managerial linguistic complexity during conference calls. By further decomposing managerial linguistic complexity into an information component and an obfuscation component, we find that comparability lowers the information component of conference calls, but not the obfuscation component. This finding suggests that managers strategically adjust the information content of disclosure during conference calls depending on financial information comparability. This strategic disclosure behavior in conference calls is manifested under management disclosure incentives based on firms’ market positions. Overall, our findings advance our understanding of management disclosure incentives regarding voluntary disclosure concurrently with financial statement comparability.