Earnings conference calls are an important platform of financial communication. They provide researchers with unique opportunities to observe firm managers’ and financial analysts’ interactions and natural communication style in a daily-task environment. Relying on multidisciplinary theories and methods, this dissertation studies financial communication in conference calls from both the managers’ and the sell-side analysts’ perspectives. It consists of three self-contained studies. Chapter 2 focuses on managers’ communication strategies in conference calls. It explores, in the small non-negative earnings surprises setting, whether non-manipulators design communication strategies to separate themselves from earnings manipulators, and whether manipulators pool through
obfuscation. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on sell-side analysts’ communication behaviour in conference calls. Chapter 3 examines how analysts’ people skills affect their communication behaviour and relationships with firm management. Chapter 4 applies both qualitative and quantitative discourse analyses and investigates how analysts use linguistic politeness strategies to establish socially desirable identities in publicly accessible analyst-manager interactions. The three studies combined contribute to the accounting literature by furthering our understanding of managers’ and analysts’ financial communication incentives and behaviour from multiple perspectives.