Refinitiv (LSEG) earnings-call transcripts (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

Refinitiv (LSEG) transcripts are a paid licensed product, so they carry no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no Refinitiv / LSEG credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Refinitiv (LSEG) earnings-call transcripts are textual transcripts of public-company conference calls (earnings calls and other analyst-management calls), with the call segmented into presentation and question-and-answer sections and tagged by speaker (management, analyst, operator). They are one of the standard corpora for textual analysis of corporate disclosure, alongside S&P Global / Capital IQ transcripts; researchers use them to measure tone, topic attention, and the timing of management discussion of specific issues. A paper we distill uses them: Kruttli, Roth Tran & Watugala run textual analysis of hurricane-channel discussion across the 120 trading days after landfall over 2002-2019.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: Refinitiv / LSEG (lineage through Thomson Reuters; the transcript product traces to StreetEvents).
• Coverage: global public companies, denser for large U.S. and developed-market firms; usable history reaches back to the early 2000s, with broader coverage in later years.

Access (when licensed)

• Through a Refinitiv/LSEG feed or a research data licence. Transcripts are delivered as structured documents (often per-call files with speaker and section tags) through a Refinitiv/LSEG entitlement or a negotiated bulk research licence. Check which route your institution provides.
• Keyed by company identifier and event date. Each transcript is tied to a company (Refinitiv identifiers, mappable to RIC/PERMNO) and a call date/event; an extract is a set of calls for a firm list over a date range.
• Credentials are required. Keep any credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Coverage is selective and grows over time. Not every call is transcribed; coverage skews to larger, more-followed firms and thickens in later years. Absence of a transcript is not evidence a call did not happen, and a firm panel conditioned on transcript presence is size-biased.
• Speaker and section tags are the analysis unit and they vary. Tone and attention measures differ sharply between the scripted presentation and the unscripted Q&A; tagging quality and the operator/analyst/management labels are not perfectly consistent across vintages. Parse and validate the segmentation rather than treating the whole transcript as one block.
• Transcription is approximate. Transcripts are produced from audio and contain misspellings, mis-attributions, and “[inaudible]” gaps; named-entity and keyword counts inherit these errors. Build dictionaries and matching to be robust to transcription noise.
• Event timing versus call timing. The call date is not the period the call discusses; aligning text to an event window (as in the distilled paper’s post-landfall windows) requires the actual call date, not the fiscal period. Be explicit about which date drives the window.
• Licensing forbids redistribution. The corpus cannot be re-posted; published work can report derived measures (counts, tone scores) but not the raw text. Keep derived features, not the source documents, in any shared artifact.
• Identifier linking. Refinitiv company identifiers must be linked to CRSP/Compustat; the join has known mismatches across reorganizations and ticker changes. Verify the link rather than assuming a clean one-to-one map.

Reference: transcript structure

Element	What it is
Header	Company, call date/time, event type, identifiers
Presentation	Scripted management remarks
Q&A	Unscripted analyst questions and management answers
Speaker tags	Management / analyst / operator attribution

The presentation/Q&A split and speaker tags are the units most textual measures are built on; validate the segmentation for the vintage you pulled.

Citation

Cite the provider and database, e.g.: Refinitiv / LSEG earnings-call transcripts, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the firm universe, the date range, the sections analyzed (presentation, Q&A, or both), and the extraction date so the text sample is reproducible.