  Every fiscal quarter, companies hold earnings calls in which company
executives respond to questions from analysts. After these calls, analysts
often change their price target recommendations, which are used in equity
research reports to help investors make decisions. In this paper, we examine
analysts' decision making behavior as it pertains to the language content of
earnings calls. We identify a set of 20 pragmatic features of analysts'
questions which we correlate with analysts' pre-call investor recommendations.
We also analyze the degree to which semantic and pragmatic features from an
earnings call complement market data in predicting analysts' post-call changes
in price targets. Our results show that earnings calls are moderately
predictive of analysts' decisions even though these decisions are influenced by
a number of other factors including private communication with company
executives and market conditions. A breakdown of model errors indicates
disparate performance on calls from different market sectors.
