The Questioning of Special Items During Conference Calls: High Quality or Highly Questionable?

ABSTRACT

Accounting standards require firms to distinguish recurring revenues and expenses from nonrecurring gains and losses, which are often referred to as special items. However, not all special items are genuinely nonrecurring. Exploiting the setting of earnings conference calls, we explore whether analysts can identify opportunistic special items, as evidenced by asking for more information about them. We find evidence that managers' discussions of special items more often relate to predicted special items, whereas analysts have more questions about potentially opportunistic special items. Managers adopt a relatively more negative tone and use more words when answering questions about potentially opportunistic special items. Finally, we find that analysts who question potentially opportunistic special items have fewer opportunities to speak in the subsequent call, consistent with managerial retaliation.