This paper reconciles conflicting evidence in prior literature on the relative ability of earnings and cash flows in predicting future cash flows. Further, we investigate the implications of temporal shifts in accrual properties and operating environment for cash flow predictability. Three key insights emerge. First, cash flows consistently outperform earnings in predicting future cash flows. Second, accruals and its components, including those capturing non-articulating events, have incremental (albeit small) predictive ability over cash flows. Third, earnings’ ability to predict future cash flows has increased over the period 1989–2015, due to changes in operating environment rather than accrual properties.

This paper deepens our understanding of the anatomy of an earnings conference call. Prior research indicates that, on average, analysts providing bullish stock recommendations or beatable earnings forecasts benefit from greater access to corporate management. Therefore, we analyze whether and to what extent individual analysts' ex ante stock recommendations and earnings forecasts affect the information content of analyst-manager conversations. Using intraday absolute stock price reactions around specific analyst-manager dialogs to measure informativeness, we find that manager dialogs with bearish analysts whose forecasts are missed are more informative. Such analysts engage in longer conversations with more back-and-forth iterations and exhibit a more negative tone, relative to bullish analysts that provide beatable forecasts. Stock prices directionally respond to both the analyst's linguistic tone and the manager's voice pitch. In sum, the capital market effects during an earnings conference call are far more nuanced than previously documented.