Curated Measures

Price and Cost Dynamics

See when companies say they can raise prices — and when costs are outpacing them.

Updated Mar 24, 2026 7 series 398 viewers 8 downloaders

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Overview

Price and Cost Dynamics separates what executives say about prices from what they say about costs in earnings calls. It is built from executive speech only—not analyst questions—across public firms in 80+ countries from 2002 to today. Use it to study pricing power, inflation pass-through, and margin pressure with both time-series and firm-level panel exports.

Why this measure matters

Price pressure and cost pressure are related, but they are not the same signal.

A company can talk about rising input costs without showing pricing power. Another can keep talking about price increases even as cost pressure eases. Looking at both together helps you see whether management commentary points to pricing strength or margin squeeze.

This curated measure gives you three linked series:

  • Net Price Direction — are executives talking more about raising prices than cutting them?
  • Net Cost Direction — are executives talking more about rising costs than easing costs?
  • Price-Cost Spread — is pricing discussion running ahead of cost pressure, or is cost pressure dominating?

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Price-Cost Spread over time

Date range: January 1, 2002 to March 31, 2026.

Time-series chart for Price-Cost Spread over time.
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Interpretation and limitations

The unit is matching sentences in executive speech.

A Price-Cost Spread of +1.0 means that, on average, net price-direction discussion exceeded net cost-direction discussion by one sentence per call in that period. Positive values suggest pricing discussion is running ahead of cost pressure. Negative values suggest cost pressure is dominating.

The chart above is restricted to companies headquartered in the United States. Explore the chart for other countries on the underlying series page.

Series

7 total

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Methodology and data

For each earnings call, NL Analytics counts sentences spoken by executives that indicate:

  • upward price discussion (P+)
  • downward price discussion (P−)
  • upward cost discussion (C+)
  • downward or easing cost discussion (C−)

From those counts, the headline metrics are:

  • Net Price Direction = P+ − P−
  • Net Cost Direction = C+ − C−
  • Price-Cost Spread = (P+ − P−) − (C+ − C−)

Full query details are available on the underlying series pages. Keyword lists and exclusions may be refined over time as part of ongoing validation.

References

NL Analytics. (2026). Price and Cost Dynamics [Data set]. NL Analytics. https://apps.nlanalytics.tech/curated-measures/price-and-cost-dynamics/

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