Evaluating information content of earnings calls to predict bankruptcy using machine learnings techniques

Abstract: This study investigates the prediction of firms’ health in terms of bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy based on the sentiments extracted from the earnings calls. Bankruptcy prediction has long been a critical topic in the world of accounting and finance. A firm's economic health is the current financial condition of the firm and is crucial to its stakeholders such as creditors, investors, shareholders, partners, and even customers and suppliers. Various methodologies and strategies have been proposed in research domain for predicting company bankruptcy more promptly and accurately. Conventionally, financial risk prediction has solely been based on historic financial data. However, an increasing number of finance papers also analyze textual data during the last few years. Company’s earnings calls are the key source of information to investigate the current financial condition and how the businesses are doing and what the expectations are for the next quarters. During the call, management offers an overview of recent performance and provide a guidance for the next quarter expectations. The earnings calls summary is provided by the management and can extract the CEO’s sentiments using sentiment analysis. In the last decade, Machine Learnings based techniques have been proposed to achieve accurate predictions of firms’ economic health. Even though most of these techniques work well in a limited context, on a broader perspective these techniques are unable to retrieve the true semantic from the earnings calls, which result in the lower accuracy in predicting the actual condition of firms’ economic health. Thus, state-of-the-art Machine Learnings and Deep Learnings techniques have been used in this thesis to improve accuracy in predicting the firms’ health from the earnings calls. Various machine learnings and deep learnings method have been applied on web-scraped earnings calls data-set, and the results show that LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORY (LSTM) is the best machine learnings technique as compared to the comparison set of models.