Quarterly earnings conference calls convey fundamental information, as well as manager and analyst opinion about the firm. We examine how market uncertainty regarding firm valuation is affected by conference call tones. Using textual analysis of all publicly available earnings calls (2002-2012)...

Previous studies show that economic policy uncertainty has been rising steadily since the 1960s (Baker et al. 2014), and that this secular increase has led to harmful economic outcomes such as reduced investment rates (Gulen and Ion 2016). Other studies find that politically connected directors...

Very little is known about whether personal characteristics of senior managers convey information about audit risk. We focus on one characteristic of the CEO, the number of years the CEO has worked in the firm before becoming the CEO (CEO in-house experience). We posit that the CEO's in-house...

We find a positive and significant relation between forecasted idiosyncratic volatility andreturns in a large international database covering 57 countries with over three million firmmonthobservations from July 1995 to June 2016. Our empirical results reveal substantialcross-country variation in...