Research on earnings conference calls documents that the question and answer (Q&A) portion is informative to market participants. However, prior studies on earnings calls focus on the attributes of managers and analysts individually. In this study, we use the interaction itself as our unit of...

We present 60 experienced credit analysts with financial information for two firms: one that mainly outsources production and one that does not. We find that analysts are better able to identify firm characteristics that make an outsourcer more creditworthy when those characteristics are...