Roughly a quarter of the CEOs running S&P 500 companies were born outside the United States. Many of them, at some point, step up to a microphone and deliver news about earnings, strategy, or the occasional embarrassing correction to prior financial statements. When investors listen in, often without ever seeing the executive’s face, does the sound of a foreign accent change how they respond?
A new study in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance tests that question directly, and the results push against a common assumption that foreign accents are a professional liability. Under the right conditions, investors in the experiment were willing to put more money into a company led by a CEO who sounded foreign than one who sounded American.
The question behind the experiment
Devendra Kale and Anis Triki, both at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Business, wanted to isolate one specific signal: accent. That’s harder than it sounds. A foreign-born CEO might also have a non-American name, a non-American appearance, or a public biography that shapes how investors interpret everything they say. Previous research has shown that names alone can trigger bias, and that facial attractiveness influences pay packages and investment decisions. To get at accent on its own, the authors had to strip all of that away.
Their setup also differs in a few ways from earlier work on the topic. Prior studies have looked at earnings calls featuring good or bad financial news; Kale and Triki zeroed in on earnings restatements, which are announcements that a company’s previously reported financials were wrong. Restatements are reliably bad news and can erode investor trust for years afterward, making them a stricter test of whether a CEO’s voice affects decisions.
Building the voices
To generate the CEO’s voice, the researchers used Synthesia, an AI content-creation tool that produces synthetic audio in a range of accents. They created three versions of the same restatement script: one in an American accent, one in a Kenyan accent, and one in an Indian accent. Using AI rather than voice actors helped keep tone, pace, and inflection consistent across conditions, removing the small vocal variations that humans inevitably introduce.
The CEO was never named and never shown on video. Participants heard only the audio. That design choice was deliberate: the authors wanted to rule out reactions to a CEO’s face, name, or perceived ethnicity based on appearance.
The researchers also varied a second factor: the CEO’s pre-existing reputation. Before hearing the restatement, each participant read a short business-journal-style article about the CEO. In the “good reputation” version, the CEO was described as transparent, cooperative with auditors, and committed to strong disclosure. In the “bad reputation” version, the same CEO was portrayed as secretive, combative with auditors, and known for aggressive accounting.
Who participated and what they did
The researchers recruited 290 U.S.-based participants through the online platform Prolific, screening for people who had purchased individual stocks and had at least one year of investing experience. Participants who invested only in cryptocurrency were excluded. The average participant was 41 years old with about a decade of investing experience.
Each participant was told to imagine they had $50,000 in savings and were planning to invest $10,000 in a fictional company called “Chocodelight.” They read background on the company, the article about the CEO’s reputation, analyst forecasts, and the income statement. Then they listened to the CEO announce an earnings restatement. Finally, they decided how much of the $10,000 to actually invest, and answered questions about the CEO’s credibility and how clearly they understood the announcement.
What the data showed
When the CEO had a good reputation, participants invested an average of $3,713 with the Kenyan-accented CEO, compared with $2,599 with the American-accented CEO — a difference of more than $1,100. When the CEO had a bad reputation, accent didn’t matter: participants invested modest amounts in both conditions, and the foreign-accent CEO actually received slightly less.
Put another way: a foreign accent wasn’t penalized in the experiment, but it wasn’t universally rewarded either. The positive effect showed up only when it was paired with a track record of good disclosure and transparent dealings with auditors. If the CEO’s reputation was already poor, investors appeared to focus on that signal and largely ignored how the CEO sounded.
To explore why the foreign accent helped reputationally strong CEOs, the authors looked at perceived disclosure credibility — essentially, how believable, accurate, and trustworthy participants rated the CEO’s restatement statement. They found that the Kenyan-accented CEO with a good reputation was rated more credible than the American-accented CEO with the same reputation. Higher perceived credibility, in turn, was linked to higher investment amounts. This chain helps explain the accent effect: a foreign accent paired with a strong track record appeared to boost credibility, which boosted willingness to invest.
One finding cut the other way. Participants rated the Kenyan-accented CEO’s announcement as harder to understand than the American-accented version, consistent with research showing that foreign accents take more mental effort to process. That difficulty did not, in this experiment, outweigh the positive effects on credibility.
Not all foreign accents are the same
The researchers then ran an additional 140 participants through the same experiment using an Indian accent. They found that an Indian-accented CEO with a good reputation also attracted more investment than an American-accented CEO with a good reputation. So far, the pattern held.
But the mechanism looked different. Unlike with the Kenyan accent, participants did not rate the Indian-accented CEO’s disclosure as more credible, did not find the announcement harder to understand, and did not perceive the CEO as notably more competent. The investment boost was there, but the underlying perceptions that seemed to drive it in the Kenyan condition were absent.
The researchers point to familiarity as a likely explanation. More than 95% of participants correctly identified the Indian accent, while fewer than 50% correctly identified the Kenyan accent. Given the prominence of Indian-origin executives in major U.S. firms, participants may have processed the Indian-accented speaker as a familiar type of business leader rather than an unusual one. The authors argue this matters for future research: treating all “foreign accents” as a single category may miss real differences in how investors respond.
Caveats worth noting
The study has limits the authors flag. It used one specific version of each accent, not the many variations that exist within each country or region. The scenario involved negative news (a restatement); the effects might differ for positive announcements. Participants were nonprofessional investors, so the findings may not extend to institutional money managers. And because audio was used without video, the experiment can’t speak to how accent interacts with appearance or name.
For executives, boards, and communications teams, the experiment offers a single, narrow observation: in a controlled setting, a foreign accent did not damage investor perceptions and, when paired with a record of strong disclosure, was associated with higher willingness to invest. Whether that pattern holds in the messier conditions of real capital markets is a question for the research still to come.
