Compare key business risks on a common scale
A historical five-risk comparison
Which risks dominate corporate attention—and by how much? Compare five risks on a common scale using earnings calls from 2018 to early 2022.
What the chart shows
Corporate risk discussions changed sharply between 2018 and early 2022. COVID-19 risk dominated from early 2020, while Supply Chain risk became a major concern during 2021. Inflation risk also increased, but remained smaller than the other two measures during much of that period.
The comparison reveals more than timing. In late 2021, for example, Supply Chain risk was roughly twice as prominent as Inflation risk, while remaining about half as prominent as COVID-19 risk. A common scale makes those differences interpretable rather than simply showing whether each topic rose or fell relative to its own history.
Why the measures can be compared directly
Every measure is constructed from the same source—corporate earnings calls—and with the same measurement framework. A sentence contributes to a Risk measure when it contains language associated with the topic and a term related to risk or uncertainty.
Applying the same construction across topics creates cardinal comparability: the magnitude of one Risk measure can be compared with the magnitude of another. This avoids combining surveys, market indicators, or topic-specific indices that use different units and baselines.
What researchers can do with the data
- Monitor changing priorities. Identify which risks occupy the most corporate attention and when their relative ranking changes.
- Compare firms and markets. Use firm-level data to study how concerns differ across companies, sectors, and countries.
- Explain aggregate shifts. Move from a change in a measure to the underlying corporate text and investigate the narrative behind it.
These applications make the measures useful both as standalone monitoring signals and as inputs into broader research on firms, markets, and economic shocks.
Explore the underlying dataset
Explore Cardinal Risk Comparison in Curated Measures, also described there as the Key Business Risks Monitor. Its seven-topic framework covers AI, Brexit, COVID-19, Inflation, Russia, Supply Chain, and Trade. The historical chart above illustrates five of those risks.
The dataset page lists the currently available series, methodology, and download options. The framework's topics and the series available for download are distinct; use the series list to see what is included today.
Academic foundation
The methodology is presented in “Text as Data in Economic Analysis”, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2025. The article explains how corporate-generated text can reveal economic changes that are difficult to observe in traditional data sources.
Discuss your research question
Want to explore how comparable text-based measures could support your own research? Book a conversation with the NL Analytics team.