Curated Measures

Macroeconomic Attention

Data through Sep 30, 2026 Updated Oct 22, 2026 9 series

Track how often executives and analysts discuss nine macroeconomic topics—including inflation, employment, and monetary policy—on calls.

Based on peer-reviewed research The Review of Economic Studies, 2025

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At a glance

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

CSV: time series, firm panel

Source

English earnings calls

Overview

Macroeconomic Attention applies the nine macroeconomic topic dictionaries from Song and Stern (2025, The Review of Economic Studies) to corporate earnings calls. While Song and Stern measure macroeconomic attention in annual US SEC 10-K filings, this dataset tracks sentence-level Exposure across global quarterly earnings calls for nine topics: consumption, economic conditions, economic growth, employment, housing, inflation, investment, monetary policy, and oil.

Use it to

  • Measure corporate attention to central bank policy (Attention to monetary policy) and inflation (Attention to inflation) across countries and monetary regimes.
  • Test how firm-level macroeconomic attention moderates the transmission of interest-rate shocks to investment, hiring, and pricing.
  • Compare which industries focus on labor markets (Attention to employment), energy (Attention to oil), or demand (Attention to consumption, Attention to housing).
  • Extend Song and Stern's annual US 10-K attention framework to quarterly global earnings-call panels.

What it does not measure

  • Applies Song and Stern's (2025) topic dictionaries to quarterly earnings-call transcripts rather than the annual SEC Form 10-K filings analyzed in the paper.
  • Some topic dictionaries use US-centric statistical terms (such as FOMC, JOLTS, non-farm payroll, ADP employment report); check matched sentences when analyzing non-US firms.
  • Call-level CSV exports report raw matched-sentence counts (Exposure), not pre-normalized keyword densities or causal estimates of monetary policy efficacy; divide by nr_of_sentences downstream to normalize for call length.

Explore the data

What to look for

In the featured Attention to monetary policy series, mentions of the FOMC, monetary policy, and quantitative easing are near zero from 2002 through 2007 (0.000 to 0.0025) before stepping up during the global financial crisis and early QE programs (0.011 in Q4 2010). Attention rises further during the Q3 2013 "taper tantrum" (0.018) and the 2015 Fed rate-liftoff debates (0.023 in Q2–Q4 2015), then subsides to 0.010–0.013 in 2018 and 2020–2021. It surges to its all-time peak during the global inflation and tightening cycle (0.034 in Q1–Q2 2023, nearly triple its 2021 level) before gradually easing to 0.018 by Q3 2026.

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

Attention to monetary policy over time

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

Time-series chart for Attention to monetary policy over time.
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Attention to monetary policy over time. Exposure series, shown quarterly. Saved search date range: January 1, 2002 to September 30, 2026.

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Series

9 total Data through Sep 30, 2026

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Methodology and data

Methodology

Song and Stern (2025) construct nine macroeconomic topic lexicons to study how firm attention shapes the transmission of monetary policy. We implement their nine topic dictionaries as sentence-level queries on earnings calls.

For each earnings call and each topic, the Exposure measure (exposure) counts the number of sentences containing at least one keyword or phrase from that topic's dictionary:

Series name Song & Stern (2025) category Complete query
Attention to consumption Consumption consumer confidence, consumer credit, consumer sentiment, durable goods, personal income, retail sales
Attention to economic conditions General economic condition*
Attention to economic growth Output GDP, economic growth, macroeconomic condition*, construction spending, national activity, recession
Attention to employment Employment unemployment, JOLTS, labor market, jobless claims, jobs report, non-farm payroll, ADP employment report, employment cost index
Attention to housing Housing home sales, home prices, housing starts, housing market
Attention to inflation Inflation price index, price level, consumer price index, CPI, PMI, PPI, inflation, inflationary, disinflation, disinflationary, hyperinflation, hyperinflationary
Attention to investment Investment business inventor*, manufacturing survey, factory orders, business outlook survey, manufacturing index, industrial production, business optimism, wholesale trade
Attention to monetary policy FOMC FOMC, monetary policy, quantitative easing
Attention to oil Oil oil prices, oil supply, oil demand

Each series export also includes topic-conditioned Risk (risk) and Sentiment (sentiment, positive, negative) sentence counts, plus total transcript sentences (nr_of_sentences) and words (nr_of_words) for length normalization.

Changes to this measure

Updated 23 October 2026. We recalculated this measure's series with our new search engine. They now run through 15 October 2026. Values for earlier quarters can differ slightly from the previous series, which are available on request. The exception is Attention to investment: The updated search finds slightly more of its mentions, and in Q3 2020, Q2 2023 and Q3 2024 its risk value is up to half its average level higher than before. Please note that no measure file ncludes the future column, because Future hasn't been rolled out yet.

References

Song, W. & Stern, S., "Firm Inattention and the Efficacy of Monetary Policy: A Text-Based Approach," The Review of Economic Studies, 92(5):3438-3469 (2025)

NL Analytics. (2026). Macroeconomic Attention [Data set]. NL Analytics. https://apps.nlanalytics.tech/curated-measures/macro-attention-index/

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