Private communication between managers and financial analysts : evidence from taxi ride patterns in New York City

This study constructs a novel measure that aims to capture face-to-face private communications between firm managers and sell-side analysts by mapping detailed, large-volume taxi trip records from New York City to the GPS coordinates of companies and brokerages. Consistent with earnings releases prompting needs for private communications, we observe that daily taxi ride volumes between companies and brokerages increase significantly around earnings announcement dates (EAD) and reach their peak on EAD. After controlling for an extensive set of fixed effects (firm, analyst, year, and firm-broker) and other potential confounding factors, we find that increases in ride volumes around EAD are negatively associated with analysts’ earnings forecast errors in periods after EAD and positively associated with the profitability of recommendations issued after EAD (but these effects dissipate over longer horizons). Taken together, our results suggest that analysts may obtain a private source of information orthogonal to their pre-existing information from these in-person meetings, which may help them better understand the implications of current earnings signals for future earnings