Financial Communication

The course introduces to the key issues and main approaches in Financial Communication, understood broadly as communication about investment activities and aimed to inform investment decisions. The course takes valuation as the main focus of communicative interactions between market participants and draws from Finance and Communication Theory scholarship as well as from Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to provide basic conceptual and methodological tools to analyse financial disclosures, financial news and communicative interactions between market participants.

The course is composed of three main teaching units:

Perspectives on Financial Communication - Andrea Rocci

• Communication, information and markets: the case of signaling.
• From signaling to strategic communication.
• Defining Financial Communication: the Public Relations perspective.
• Defining Financial Communication: the Accounting perspective.
• Reading and understanding scholarship about Financial Communication.
• Analysing financial disclosures and other genres in Financial Communication.

  Markets, information and valuation - Carlo Raimondo

• Financial markets today: what is happening, why. Capital markets expectations.
• Information and finance, focus on the insights from the markets.
• From communication to evaluation. Theory, practice and case study.
• How equity financial analysts work (guest lecture)
• Financial communication in special occasions (M&A, IPOs)

Natural Language Processing methods in Financial Communication - Giulia D'Agostino

• Basic manipulation of texts with corpus linguistic techniques and extract similarity features across documents
• Knowledge about basic computational linguistics techniques for domain-specific inquiries, such as sentiment analysis
• Command in the analysis of dialogical texts on a dedicated platform, supplemented by tools developed for the analysis of financial Q&A

The three main course units are complemented by a unit devoted to writing a master thesis in Financial Communication.

The master thesis in Financial Communication - D'Agostino, Raimondo, Rocci

• The research question
• The literature review
• The empirical research

Students are invited to check the full course contents in the detailed syllabus that will be available on iCorsi.

The course will help students to

• Use foundations of Communication Theory and Finance to understand Financial Communication as social interaction between multiple stakeholders around investment activities and as information flow affecting investment decisions.
• Understand the interaction between firms and financial markets in terms of signaling and disclosure, taking into account intermediaries and other stakeholders
• Focus on valuation as the core of the communicative interaction between firms and financial markets, appreciating the synergy of qualitative (narrative) and quantitative information in firm valuation
• Use both the Finance and the Communication scholarships to understand financial communication problems.
• Introduce computational text analysis techniques for the study of financial documents – including company disclosures – as one of the most successful and established research methods in the domain.
• Get started with a master thesis in Financial Communication.

In presenza

Lectures
In class discussion of cases, group presentations and homework to be submitted during the course.
Reading and analysing relevant scientific literature.

Readings in the form of scientific articles and handbook chapters will be provided to the students via the iCorsi platform.

Links to downloadable and online software resources will be also provided.

Students are invited to check the detailed resources in the detailed syllabus that will be available on iCorsi.

In-course groupwork and assignments 30%

• Groupwork includes an exercise of firm valuation with in-class presentation.
• Assignments include the quantitative text analysis of a financial disclosure text sample and the annotation of a sample of earning call Q&A.

Final written exam 70% (Computer based).

• The written exam includes open questions and exercises on the course content and readings as well as a question concerning the analysis of a scientific paper assigned to the student.

A detailed syllabus with full details on evaluation will be uploaded on iCorsi at the start of the course. Students are invited to read it thoroughly.