Abstract: During the current COVID pandemic, the mobility of individuals is largely reduced. This paper is to investigate how this immobility-induced social isolation affects the sentiment of the earnings conference call. The empirical results provide evidence that the reduction in mobility will cause the sentiment within conference calls more negatively, and the results are only significant for the Q&A section. To further establish a causal relation, we employ several exogenous events that will change individuals’ mobility incentives: first death via COVID in the county, declaration of State of Emergency, and Stay at Home Order. All these results yield a consistent result that mobility constraint will decrease the sentiment within earnings calls. Moreover, our findings suggest the variation of mobility constraints impacts manager mood and eventually influence short-term market returns beyond firm fundamentals and analysts’ forecasts speed. Our results remain significant after using alternative proxies for mobility constraints and focusing on the manager’s specific sentiment usage.
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