Key Business Risks Monitor

Overview

The Key business risks monitor provides a real-time window into the specific threats keeping global executives up at night. Based on the methodology outlined in the Journal of Economic Perspectives article "Text as Data in Economic Analysis", these metrics track the evolution of five critical business risks—Inflation, Supply Chain, Trade, Russia, and COVID-19.

The key feature: cardinal comparability

Most risk indices are "relative" (normalized only against their own history), making it impossible to compare different types of threats.

Our Risk Scores are different. Because we use a unified measurement framework—calculating the percentage of total corporate conversation devoted to each risk—our metrics are cardinally comparable.

This means you can mathematically compare the magnitude of different risks at any single point in time. You can answer questions such as:

• "Is the corporate fear of inflation currently higher than the fear of supply chain disruptions?"
• "Did the Russia-Ukraine shock generate more anxiety than the US-China trade war?"

This allows for a true "Risk ranking", giving strategists a clear view of the relative hierarchy of concerns in the global boardroom.

Methodology

We do not just count keywords; we measure contextual exposure.
1. Topic identification: We scan transcripts for specific libraries of keywords related to each theme (e.g., "supply bottleneck", "supply shortage" for supply chain).
2. Risk contextualization: The algorithm counts these mentions only when they appear in close proximity (within the same sentence) to synonyms for risk and uncertainty.
3. The "Risk Score": The result is a precise metric, standardized across all topics to ensure valid cross-risk comparison.

The Risk Scores

We offer five specialized, comparable scores tracking the most significant disruptions of the current era:

• Inflation Risk Score
  • Tracks keywords (examples): "price hike", "wage increase", "CPI increase", "inflationary", and "higher cost".
• Supply Chain Risk Score
  • Tracks keywords (examples): "supply bottleneck", "supply shortage", "supply disruptions", "supply crunch", and "supply tightness".
• Trade War Risk Score
  • Tracks keywords (examples): "tariff", "trade war", "protectionism", "antidumping", and "trade restrictions".
• Russia Risk Score
  • Tracks keywords (examples): "Russia", "Russian Federation", "Moscow", "Vladimir Putin", and "Russian banks".
• COVID-19 Risk Score
  • Tracks keywords (examples): "coronavirus", "covid", "sars-cov", and "ncov".

Why This Matters for Practitioners

• Apples-to-apples comparison: Stop guessing which narrative is dominant. Our data proves exactly which risk is consuming more management bandwidth.
• Regime change detection: Corporate risk perception often shifts before the hard data does. For example, the Supply Chain Risk Score spiked months before official data reflected the full impact of COVID-19 supply chain disruptions.
• Thematic basket trading: Use these scores to build long/short baskets. When the Trade War Risk Score rises relative to others, shorting heavily exposed importers while going long domestic producers generates uncorrelated alpha.

Frequency: bi-weekly (rolling)

A continuous monitor of thematic stress

We update these scores every two weeks, aggregating data from a rolling window of global earnings calls. This high-frequency approach allows risk managers to spot the emergence of a new narrative—or the dissipation of an old one—in real time.

Data Access

Download access to the full Key Business Risks Monitor 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: Updated bi-weekly
• Coverage: 14,000+ global companies, 2016-present