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When Amazon recently got caught in President Trump’s crosshairs for reportedly planning to list the added costs of new tariffs on products sold at its online store, the drama underscored just how much is at stake for companies amid hiked-up taxes on U.S. imports — including a 145 percent levy on all shipments from China.

As the stop-start global geoeconomic war continues, will businesses absorb most of the higher costs or pass them on to consumers? Will companies rework supply chains in search of cheaper inputs? Will they exit markets and stop selling some products or will they expand into new ones?

And it’s not just tariffs that companies are grappling with as major powers like the U.S. and China increasingly turn to economic weapons, or the threat of using them, to pursue geopolitical goals. Sanctions and export controls are also part of the modern “geoeconomic” playbook.

To shed light on how these strategies are reshaping international commerce — as well as the U.S. and global economy — a team of researchers that includes Antonio Coppola and Matteo Maggiori, both scholars at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), have developed an interactive tool that tracks how companies around the globe are reacting to economic coercion. Their new leverages recent advances in artificial intelligence to scour official transcripts of calls that publicly traded companies hold after disclosing quarterly earnings as well as financial analyst reports. 

“The availability of near real-time insights into how companies are responding to the tools of economic statecraft — whether it’s tariffs on Chinese goods or sanctions against Russia or export controls on sensitive technology — is critical if we want to understand the challenges facing the U.S. and global economies,” says Maggiori, a senior fellow at �������and The Moghadam Family Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB).

Coppola, a �������faculty fellow and assistant professor of finance at Stanford GSB, and Maggiori say that their Geoeconomic Monitor, released May 1, provides detailed and up-to-date measures of the effects of tariffs, sanctions and export controls on companies in the U.S. and globally.  The goal is to inform policymakers, business leaders and others following geoeconomic conflicts about who’s applying pressure and how, and what targeted countries and businesses are doing in response.

On tariffs, the index shows that more than 5 percent of public U.S. companies indicated in the first two quarters of 2025 that they plan to raise prices in response to new import duties — and nearly 15 percent said they expect to rejigger their supply chains as a result. Most of these disclosures came even before Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement of sweeping tariffs, now temporarily reduced to 10 percent on all countries except for China as the Trump administration seeks trade concessions with the European Union and other impacted countries.

“These are extremely striking numbers,” Coppola says. In the previous two years, less than 0.1 percent of U.S. public companies explicitly talked about adjusting their prices. What’s more, companies often don’t publicly disclose pricing or supply chain plans, which means the number of businesses considering such changes is likely greater than the data can capture.

Currently, the index also reveals that 55 percent of global businesses overall are expressing concern about tariffs. Of those, 40 percent indicate that the threat of future tariffs is already “negatively impacting” their operations — which could mean a range of harms, including lost investor confidence, delayed investments or customer losses. The impact on American firms is even more pronounced — with 68 percent of American firms reporting a negative impact from tariffs in the current quarter. This is a substantially higher share of American businesses than those that reported feeling pain during the U.S.-China trade war in 2018, during Trump’s first term.

“The spike in concerns about tariffs, whether current or in the future, shows just how pervasively impactful the current trade war has already been for companies, particularly within the U.S.,” says Coppola, adding that the index will be continuously updated.

The AI revolution meets geoeconomics research

Until recently, the Geoeconomic Monitor — a product of , which Maggiori co-founded and co-directs with Jesse Schreger of Columbia Business School — would not have been possible, Coppola says. Geoeconomic power comes not just from the actual use of sanctions, tariffs or other economic tools. It also comes from threats of economic retaliation, and the effects of unrealized threats are difficult to track, let alone measure.

“You can recognize instances of economic pressure when you see it,” says Coppola. “But it’s very, very hard to study them in a systematic, rigorous and quantitative way.”

The new monitoring tool — built by Coppola, Maggiori, Christopher Clayton of Yale School of Management and Schreger — cracks that challenge.

Major advances in large language models (LLMs), which are a form of artificial intelligence that can process and interpret vast amounts of data, changed that. According to a new working paper detailing the creation of the Geoeconomic Monitor, two LLMs scoured close to 360,000 transcripts of earnings calls held by public companies around the world starting in 2008 and nearly 350,000 analyst reports beginning in 2011.

Coppola says that the real advantage of the LLMs isn’t that they detect when company leaders use words like “tariffs” or “sanctions” and “pricing”; that capability, known as natural language processing, has been possible and used by researchers for more than a decade. What’s remarkable about LLMs is their ability to infer particular details of how companies are reacting to these developments in real time and on a large scale.

“We can now do something we’ve never really been able to do before at scale, which is to dive deeply into the details of how different actors in the economy are responding to different geoeconomic policies or to different geoeconomic concerns,” Coppola says.