Curated Measures

Geopolitical Risk

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

Measure corporate geopolitical and conflict risk discussion in earnings calls, adapting themes from Caldara & Iacoviello (AER, 2022) to firms.

Based on peer-reviewed research American Economic Review, 2022

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At a glance

Coverage
About 16,800 companies in 94 countries
Period
Jan 2002 – Sep 30, 2026
Updates
Monthly
Files

CSV: time series, firm panel

Source

English earnings calls

Overview

Corporate Geopolitical Risk adapts the geopolitical themes studied in Caldara and Iacoviello (2022, American Economic Review) from newspaper archives to corporate earnings calls. It counts sentences in each call where geopolitical, military, sanction, or conflict keywords co-occur with a risk or uncertainty synonym.

Use it to

  • Track how wars, sanctions, trade embargoes, and regional conflicts surface in corporate risk discussion.
  • Compare geopolitical risk exposure across sectors, headquarters countries, and multinational supply chains.
  • Combine call-level geopolitical risk counts with firm investment, cross-border M&A, or stock-return panels.

What it does not measure

  • Adapts geopolitical themes to earnings-call sentences rather than replicating Caldara and Iacoviello's newspaper-based GPR index calculation.
  • Includes broad terms (country, countries, political, security, geograph*) alongside conflict and sanction terms; inspect matched sentences in the Snippet Tool when isolating military or conflict-specific shocks.
  • Measures call-level discussion frequency, not the objective probability of geopolitical conflict or realized financial losses.

Explore the data

What to look for

Geopolitical risk discussion spikes around major military conflicts and sanctions regimes. It jumps during the 2003 invasion of Iraq (peaking at 0.26 in Q3 2003), falls to a multi-year low near 0.10 between Q4 2005 and Q1 2008, and rises moderately after the 2014 annexation of Crimea (0.17 in Q1 2015). Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the series more than doubles from 0.12 in Q4 2021 to 0.29 in Q4 2022, eases to 0.17 in Q1 2024, and climbs to its series high of 0.33 in Q3 2026 amid Middle East conflict and escalating trade and sanction tensions.

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

Geopolitical risk over time

Date range: January 1, 2002 to September 30, 2026.

Time-series chart for Geopolitical risk over time.
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Mean risk-related matched sentences per earnings call, measured in Matched sentences, shown quarterly using a 4-quarter moving average. Q1 2002 to Q3 2026, 99 data points. Higher values mean more risk discussion.

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

While Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) measure geopolitical risk in newspaper archives, this dataset tracks geopolitical risk discussion in corporate earnings calls.

For each earnings call, the Risk measure counts sentences that contain at least one term from the geopolitical query below and at least one risk or uncertainty synonym from the Oxford Thesaurus (excluding question, questions, and venture):

war, military, terror*, geopolitical, conflict, "Middle East", Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Libya, Ukrain*, Russia*, "North Korea", Venezuela, coup, expropriation, confiscation, nationalism, security, protest*, country, countries, political, retaliation, unrest, geograph*, troop*, sanction, sanctions, embargo, wars, warfare, army, navy, weapon*, combat, missile*, immigration, diplomacy

The downloadable firm-panel CSV also includes Exposure (all sentences matching the query) and Sentiment (positive - negative on matched sentences), alongside transcript sentence and word counts (nr_of_sentences, nr_of_words).

Changes to this dataset

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

References

Caldara, D. & Iacoviello, M., "Measuring Geopolitical Risk," American Economic Review, 112(4):1194-1225 (2022)

NL Analytics. (2026). Geopolitical Risk [Data set]. NL Analytics. https://apps.nlanalytics.tech/curated-measures/global-corporate-geopolitical-risk-index/

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