The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:30:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png A New Dataset of Historical States of Incorporation of U.S. Stocks 1994-2019 – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 A New Dataset of Historical States of Incorporation of U.S. Stocks 1994-2019 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/01/02/a-new-dataset-of-historical-states-of-incorporation-of-u-s-stocks-1994-2019/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-new-dataset-of-historical-states-of-incorporation-of-u-s-stocks-1994-2019 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/01/02/a-new-dataset-of-historical-states-of-incorporation-of-u-s-stocks-1994-2019/#comments Thu, 02 Jan 2020 14:30:38 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=125460?d=20230310100043EST Posted by Holger Spamann and Colby Wilkinson (Harvard Law School), on Thursday, January 2, 2020
Editor's Note:

Holger Spamann is the Lawrence R. Grove Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Colby Wilkinson is an Empirical Research Associate at Harvard Law School. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes Firms’ Decisions Where to Incorporate by Lucian Bebchuk and Alma Cohen.

To learn about the effects of (state) corporate law, researchers often compare the performance of firms incorporated in different states. An obvious requirement for such comparisons is to know where firms are incorporated, or more to the point, where they were incorporated at the moment of the comparison (“historical state of incorporation”). Unfortunately, identifying the historical state of incorporation is not reliably possible with standard data sources. In particular, Compustat/CRSP contains the state of incorporation only as a so-called header variable, meaning the variable is part of the stock’s identifying information that constantly updates and hence only reflects the most recent state of incorporation. The problem is that firms may change their state of incorporation. A researcher downloading the data in 2019 could not be sure that a firm listed as incorporated in state X was also incorporated in state X in 1998 or even in 2018. The WRDS SEC Analytics Suite extracts historical state of incorporation data from the SEC’s Edgar system, but it is such a premium product that not even Harvard presently subscribes to it.

(more…)

]]> https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/01/02/a-new-dataset-of-historical-states-of-incorporation-of-u-s-stocks-1994-2019/feed/ 1