Curated Measures

Price and Cost Dynamics

Data through Oct 15, 2026 Updated Oct 22, 2026 7 series

Track executive discussion of price increases, price cuts, and cost pressures in earnings calls to study pass-through and margins.

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At a glance

Coverage
About 16,600 companies in 94 countries
Period
Jan 2002 – Oct 15, 2026
Updates
Monthly
Files

CSV: time series, firm panel

Source

English earnings calls

Overview

Price and Cost Dynamics measures how often executives discuss upward and downward changes in output prices and input costs during earnings calls. Built from corporate executive speech (excluding analyst questions), the dataset provides four directional sentence-count series (P+, P-, C+, C-), two net direction series, and the headline Price-Cost Spread.

Use it to

  • Separate executive commentary on input-cost pressure from commentary on output-price increases.
  • Track whether pricing discussion outpaces or lags cost discussion across sectors and inflation regimes.
  • Merge call-level price and cost measures with accounting margins, producer prices, or stock returns.
  • Compare domestic and international pass-through dynamics across headquarters countries.

What it does not measure

  • Does not measure realized product price changes, invoice prices, or accounting cost of goods sold.
  • Captures what executives choose to emphasize on calls; silence does not imply constant prices or costs.
  • Because queries restrict to executive speech, normalize raw counts in downstream panel work with nr_of_sentences_filtered (executive sentences) rather than full-transcript nr_of_sentences.

Explore the data

What to look for

Positive values indicate that net upward price discussion (P+ − P−) exceeds net upward cost discussion (C+ − C−) by that many sentences per call on average; negative values indicate cost-pressure discussion dominates.

In the US series, the spread briefly turned positive during the post-GFC recovery (+0.14 in Q1 2010) and early reopening demand (+0.10 in Q1 2021), before plunging to its series trough (−0.50 in Q2 2022) as supply-chain and energy cost pressures dominated executive commentary, then gradually normalizing toward zero by 2024–2026.

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

Price-Cost Spread over time

Date range: January 1, 2002 to October 15, 2026.

Time-series chart for Price-Cost Spread over time.
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Price-Cost Spread over time. Exposure series, shown quarterly. Saved search date range: January 1, 2002 to October 15, 2026. Restricted to companies headquartered in United States.

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Series

7 total Data through Oct 15, 2026

Browse the related series and open any series for its full query, filters, and methodology notes.

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Methodology and data

Methodology

For each earnings call, NL Analytics restricts evaluation to corporate executives and counts sentences matching four directional queries (each pairing price or cost terms with directional language and applying false-positive exclusions):

  • Upward price discussion (P+) — sentences indicating price increases or firmer pricing.
  • Downward price discussion (P-) — sentences indicating price cuts, discounting, or deflationary pricing.
  • Upward cost discussion (C+) — sentences indicating rising input, wage, or operating costs.
  • Downward cost discussion (C-) — sentences indicating easing or declining costs.

From those call-level sentence counts, three comparison series are constructed:

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

Full query strings and exclusions are available on each underlying series page.

Changes to this dataset

Updated 22 October 2026. We recalculated this dataset's series with Updated search. They now run through 15 October 2026, and each period's value is averaged over all earnings calls in the period (including zero-match calls) rather than only calls with matches:

  • P+, P-, C+, and C- are about 30% to 60% smaller in the median quarter.
  • Net Price Direction, Net Cost Direction, and Price-Cost Spread are about 40%, 20%, and 12% closer to zero.

The net series and spread correlate at 0.995 or higher with the previous release (0.93 to 0.99 for the four directional series). Earlier files are available on request.

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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