Off Script: When Earnings Calls and Filings Tell Different Stories

Corporate disclosures are not monolithic: managers communicate differently across earnings calls and regulatory filings, and markets fail to immediately reconcile these differences. We examine cross-channel divergence in managerial tone between earnings calls and Management’s Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) sections of 10-K filings, and show that this divergence predicts post-disclosure stock returns. Using Loughran–McDonald (2011) dictionaries applied to 22,366 matched disclosure pairs from 1,762 firms over 2006–2025, we find that sentiment divergence generates temporary return predictability consistent with interpretive conflict, while complexity divergence, capturing readability gaps between conversational calls and dense regulatory filings, produces more persistent effects consistent with processing frictions. Both effects strengthen under firm fixed effects and vary systematically with analyst participation, supporting a limited attention interpretation. The findings indicate that informational inefficiencies arise not only from tone within individual disclosures, but from the difficulty of integrating signals across institutional communication formats.