An Empirical Examination of Conference Calls as a Voluntary Disclosure Medium

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Abstract
This paper provides evidence on the characteristics of firms that hold conference calls and on whether these calls provide information to market participants. We find that firms that hold conference calls are larger, more profitable, go to the capital markets more often, and are growing more rapidly than other firms. We also find that conference calls provide information to market participants over and above the information contained in the accompanying press release. We find that trading volume and, to a lesser degree, return variance, are elevated during the time of conference calls and that average trade size is higher during the time of conference calls. We believe that this evidence is important because it suggests that material information is being released during conference calls and that a subset of large investors trade on this information in real time.