Rui is an associate professor at CUHK-Shenzhen. Before joining CUHK-Shenzhen, Rui worked as an assistant professor at NTU Singapore and Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University. He has taught Intermediate Financial Accounting for Bachelor students, Financial Analysis and Equity Valuation for master students in finance and Accounting for non-business master students. His main research interests are expectation formation and applying new techniques in the interdisciplinary research. His research has been published in Review of Financial Studies, The Accounting Review, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Accounting Studies and Strategic Management Journal.

We use a setting of overlapping conference calls, which is when multiple calls occur at the same time for firms covered by the same analyst, to examine the effect of analysts’ limited attention on managers’ voluntary disclosure choices. We first document that during overlapping calls, analysts are asking less questions and when they do ask questions they ask less future-oriented questions and questions containing complex financial terminologies, which is consistent with them being subject to limited attention. Our tests fail to provide any evidence that management changes the day and time of the call in such a way to reduce overlapping calls. Firm characteristics associated with overlapping calls include calendar fiscal quarter end, headquarter’s time zone and industry classification, most of which are factors that managers are unlikely to change. Most importantly, we find that with high overlapping calls managers issue more earnings guidance, consistent with managers offsetting analysts’ attention scarcity with more voluntary disclosures. While prior studies have mainly focused on showing the effects of receiver’s limited attention on receivers’ behavior, we study the effects of receiver’s limited attention on the behavior of information senders.