The Questioning of Special Items During Conference Calls: High Quality or Highly Questionable?

Authors

• Jiajia Fu, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
• Yuan Ji, University of Texas at Arlington
• James Potepa

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-30-2026

Abstract

Accounting standards require firms to distinguish recurring revenues and expenses from nonrecurring gains and losses, which are often referred to as special items. However, not all special items are genuinely nonrecurring. Exploiting the setting of earnings conference calls, we explore whether analysts can identify opportunistic special items, as evidenced by asking for more information about them. We find evidence that managers' discussions of special items more often relate to predicted special items, whereas analysts have more questions about potentially opportunistic special items. Managers adopt a relatively more negative tone and use more words when answering questions about potentially opportunistic special items. Finally, we find that analysts who question potentially opportunistic special items have fewer opportunities to speak in the subsequent call, consistent with managerial retaliation.

Comments

© 2026 The Author(s). Contemporary Accounting Research published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Canadian Academic Accounting Association.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Recommended Citation

Fu, J., Ji, Y. and Potepa, J., 2026. The Questioning of Special Items During Conference Calls: High Quality or Highly Questionable?. Contemporary Accounting Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.70060

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Contemporary Accounting Research

DOI

10.1111/1911-3846.70060