Curated Measures

Brexit Exposure, Risk, and Sentiment

Data through Sep 30, 2026 Updated Oct 13, 2026 1 series

Separate first- and second-moment impacts of Brexit using call-level Exposure, Risk, and Sentiment measures.

Based on peer-reviewed research Journal of Finance, 2024

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At a glance

Coverage
About 15,300 companies in 92 countries
Period
Jan 2011 – Sep 30, 2026
Updates
Quarterly
Files

CSV: time series, firm panel

Source

English earnings calls

Overview

Built on Hassan, Hollander, van Lent, and Tahoun (2024, Journal of Finance), this curated dataset tracks corporate discussion of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union across global earnings calls. Using the query Brexit, it provides call-level Exposure, Risk (second-moment uncertainty), and Sentiment (first-moment directional tone) measures for both UK and non-UK firms.

Use it to

  • Identify cross-border spillovers of Brexit across non-UK firms by headquarters country and sector.
  • Separate Brexit uncertainty (Risk) from expected directional impact (Sentiment) when studying investment, hiring, or R&D.
  • Compare corporate Brexit discussion around the 2016 referendum, the 2019 Article 50 deadlines, and the 2021 Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

What it does not measure

  • Matches only the explicit keyword Brexit; discussions of UK–EU trade friction, tariffs, or border checks that do not use the word Brexit are not captured.
  • Measures call-level sentence counts in NL Analytics rather than realized trade losses, tariff costs, or regulatory compliance expenses.
  • Call-level CSV exports report raw integer sentence counts (not pre-standardized to the paper's post-2015 UK firm mean).

Explore the data

What to look for

For EU-27 headquartered firms, Brexit Risk is zero prior to Q1 2016, jumps tenfold after the June 2016 referendum to its all-time peak in Q3 2016 (0.18 risk sentences per call), spikes again around the March and October 2019 Article 50 deadlines (0.14 in Q1 2019 and 0.11 in Q4 2019), and falls near zero from Q2 2021 onward after the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement took effect.

Click the chart to open the series, where you can filter it by headquarters country.

Brexit Exposure, Risk, and Sentiment over time

Date range: January 1, 2011 to September 30, 2026.

Time-series chart for Brexit Exposure, Risk, and Sentiment over time.
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Brexit Exposure, Risk, and Sentiment over time. Risk series, shown quarterly. Saved search date range: January 1, 2011 to September 30, 2026. Restricted to companies headquartered in EU-27.

Explore series

Series

1 total Data through Sep 30, 2026

Open the series page for its full query, filters, and methodology notes.

Methodology and data

Methodology

Hassan, Hollander, van Lent, and Tahoun (2024) introduce a text-based framework for isolating event-specific shocks at the firm level and separating second-moment uncertainty from first-moment directional expectations.

In this maintained sentence-level implementation, each earnings call is evaluated on the query Brexit to produce three call-level measures:

  • Brexit Exposure (exposure): Number of sentences in the call containing the word Brexit.
  • Brexit Risk (risk): Number of sentences containing Brexit that also contain at least one risk or uncertainty synonym from the Oxford Thesaurus (excluding question, questions, and venture).
  • Brexit Sentiment (sentiment): Number of Brexit-matched sentences containing a Loughran-McDonald positive word (positive) minus those containing a negative word (negative, excluding question and questions).

Comparison with the published paper

The original Journal of Finance paper scores windows of ±10 words around Brexit, scales by transcript length, and standardizes Brexit Sentiment in regressions so the average UK firm's post-2015 score equals −1. The downloadable CSV files on this page provide unscaled call-level sentence counts alongside transcript length (nr_of_sentences and nr_of_words) so researchers can apply their own normalization and standardization choices.

Changes to this dataset

Updated 13 October 2026. We recalculated this dataset's series with our new search engine. They now run through 30 September 2026. Values for earlier quarters can differ slightly from the previous release, which is available on request.

References

Hassan, T. A. & Hollander, S. & van Lent, L. & Tahoun, A., "The Global Impact of Brexit Uncertainty," Journal of Finance, 79(1):413-458 (2024)

NL Analytics. (2026). Brexit Exposure, Risk, and Sentiment [Data set]. NL Analytics. https://apps.nlanalytics.tech/curated-measures/brexit/

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