Reading through the Lines: Price-setting Indicators from Earnings Calls

Earnings call transcripts are a rich and timely source of information about firms’ own business conditions, as well as economic and financial conditions more broadly. The sentiment and language used during these calls provide additional context, nuance and insights that are valuable for economists trying to understand how firms make choices and how those choices affect prices.

In this episode, learn about the work of Callan Windsor and Max Zang to process and analyse over 700,000 paragraphs of text extracted from around 5,500 transcripts collected since the start of 2007 using a state-of-the-art large language model. The purpose of this was to better understand firms’ price-setting behaviour.

Guest

Data Science Team Manager Callan Windsor

Additional Resources

Reading through the Lines: Price-setting Indicators from Earnings Calls | Bulletin – September 2023 | RBA

Abstract for RDP 2023-06: Firms' Price-setting Behaviour: Insights from Earnings Calls | RBA

Transcript

‘READING THROUGH THE LINES’ PODCAST – TRANSCRIPT (rba.gov.au)