Decoding CEO Interviews: The Forward-Looking Insights from Verbal and Nonverbal Cues

Experimental studies reveal that speakers’ vocal and facial expressions convey additional insights beyond the transcript. Building on these findings, we examine how verbal and nonverbal features extracted from the forward-looking part of CEO interviews correlate with a firm’s future performance. Our results show that nonverbal cues, particularly negative facial expressions, dominate in signaling a firm’s future performance. Particularly, negative vocal and facial cues collectively diminish the positive sentiment conveyed by verbal content. Furthermore, we examine the determinants of CEOs’ communication styles presented in interviews and find that male CEOs display fewer happy expressions than female CEOs, whereas those with longer tenures, dual roles, Ivy League backgrounds, or broader networks exhibit greater pessimism or sadness during forward-looking discussions. Finally, we find that managers’ forward-looking statements remain largely short-term in focus (i.e., next quarter), even in fourth-quarter interviews, when they likely possess more private information about longer term prospects. Data Availability: Datasets are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: D81; M41.