We study whether financial analysts use linguistic tone in their questions to elicit information from management during earnings conference calls. By phrasing questions negatively, analysts signal to management that they are aware of negative issues related to firm performance and are willing to...

We study whether and how financial analysts choose tone during earnings conference calls as a means to acquire information from the firm’s management. Analyzing 32,963 analyst-managerinteractions during conference calls of the S&P 500 firms, we document that analyst questions that are...

We examine the impact of identity preferences on the interrelation between incentives and performance measurement. In our model, a manager identifies with an organization and loses utility to the extent that his actions conflict with effort-standards issued by the principal. Contrary to prior...