Charismatic Rhetoric Modeling in Conference Call on Firm Political Risk Management

Measuring and modeling rhetoric in the context of financial disclosures becomes essential as its important role in the becoming of present society and the increasing influence of corporations on economic management. We adapt rhetoric model rules from computational linguistics to construct a new measure of rhetoric (alliteration and rhyme) faced by earnings conference call of individual US firms and calculate rhetorical sentences ratio in the conference call transcript data to measure the rhetoric. We find rhetoric has a significant relationship with firm-level political risk and sentiment in the quarter of earnings conference call, which means managers' speech rhetoric will directly influence firm performance by its political risk. Our finding demonstrates the value of the rhetorical analysis by its empirical analysis in business disclosures and sheds light on future speech textual analysis research directions on firm management.