Abstract

Firms rely on a variety of channels to communicate with financial stakeholders, aiming at providing information, discharging of accountability obligations, building relationships, and facilitating decision-making. This dissertation includes three essays on corporate financial communications with information intermediaries and investors.
The first essay presents an overview of the relevant academic studies on firms' private communications with preferred investors or analysts in the post-Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) period. Drawing on the U.S. and China's Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) evidence, this essay discusses recent literature on private meetings in the post-Reg FD era and concludes with several suggestions for future research. The second essay examines listed firms' private communications. Specifically, we use the most recent private meeting records to investigate the liquidity effect of private meetings under SZSE mandatory disclosure regulation. The results provide evidence that timely disclosure of private meetings improves stock liquidity, enhances information transparency, and increases the fairness of information acquisition. The study also documents the meeting participants' heterogeneity and their different motivations for private meetings, suggesting their different influences on information transmission. The third essay explores public firms' interactive communications with investors. Using quantitative research methods, we examine whether investor-generated interactions through a centralized and stock exchange regulated platform help improve firms' investor relations and investors' information assimilation. The results suggest that interactive communication via the regulated platform helps attract the attention of market participants and increases investor and analyst following. However, increased interactions between firms and market participants may add complexity to investors and reduce their ability to assimilate firm information.
Overall, our findings could be of interest to regulators, investors, and other stakeholders interested in more transparent and effective communications between firms and market participants.