Earnings Call Slide Deck

In recent years, earnings call slide decks (hereafter, earnings decks) have become increasingly common in the earnings announcements of public firms. In this paper, I examine the characteristics of earnings decks and the determinants of firms’ use of them. More importantly, I study their capital market roles. While I fail to find evidence that earnings decks on average offer information incremental to traditional disclosures, such as press releases and conference calls, they significantly reduce users’ information processing time. My analyses reveal three mechanisms that contribute to this acceleration: inclusion of visuals (e.g., charts and tables), summarization of key information, and release prior to earnings calls. Overall, this study documents a novel aspect of earnings announcements and highlights the role of multimedia elements in reducing information processing costs of corporate disclosures. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Funding: This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72402110, 72442014]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04956 .