Brexit Exposure, Risk, and Sentiment

Overview

The Brexit Measures track where Brexit shows up in the global boardroom - and how executives frame it. Building on Hassan, Hollander, van Lent, and Tahoun's Journal of Finance research on the international spillovers of Brexit uncertainty, these signals translate earnings-call language into firm-level measures of (i) exposure, (ii) uncertainty, and (iii) expected directional impact (costs vs. benefits). It allows you to see who is affected, how uncertain it is, and which direction firms expect it to go.

Methodology

Hassan et al. (2024) introduce a text-based framework for isolating event-specific shocks at the firm level using quarterly earnings calls. We implement their definitions directly:

• From headlines to firm-level exposure: Instead of inferring Brexit impact from country-level indices, we measure it from what managers and analysts choose to discuss on earnings calls - where commercially material issues surface quickly.
• From "Brexit talk" to decomposed moments: The framework separates the second moment (uncertainty) from the first moment (expected good or bad news) by conditioning "Brexit" mentions on nearby risk/uncertainty language vs. nearby tone words.

The Brexit metrics

We provide three complementary measures, all available at the firm-quarter level:

• Brexit Exposure
  The share of a call devoted to Brexit, computed as the count of the word "Brexit".

• Brexit Risk
  The uncertainty (second-moment) component: counts only "Brexit" mentions within ±10 words of synonyms for "risk" or "uncertainty" (using single-words synonyms from the Oxford English Thesaurus).

• Brexit Sentiment
  The expected directional (first-moment) component: measures the net tone around "Brexit" using positive vs. negative words from the Loughran & McDonald dictionary within a ±10 word window, standardized so the average UK firm’s post-2015 Brexit sentiment equals −1.

Note: The original paper uses the keyword "Brexit". The same framework can be extended to variations like "hard/soft Brexit" or phrases like "no deal" and "WTO terms," but the baseline definitions above match the academic benchmark.

Why This Matters for Practitioners

For global investors, corporate risk teams, and macro strategists, these measures turn Brexit from a narrative into a quantified, tradable, and testable exposure.

• Map cross-border spillovers: Firm-level metrics let you identify which countries and industries are actually exposed - rather than assuming exposure from geography alone.
• Separate "uncertainty shock" from "expected losses": Brexit Risk captures uncertainty; Brexit Sentiment captures expected good or bad news. That separation clarifies whether firms are delaying investment because outcomes are unclear or because they expect direct losses.
• Monitor negotiation cycles and regime shifts: Spikes in Brexit-related uncertainty can provide early warning signals for precautionary behavior and repricing of internationally exposed firms.

Data Access

Download access to the full Brexit Measures requires paid export credits on a Free or Standard plan; commercial usage is included in the Research plan.

See our pricing page for more details.

• Format: CSV
• Frequency: Earnings call level metrics (firm panel)
• Coverage: 10,000+ firms globally, 2011-today