Ethics Database
2007
Data
We are making a sample of
company Ethics Codes available to encourage and facilitate research on this
topic.
We collected corporate
documents typically labeled as Codes of Business Conduct and Ethics. In most cases
these documents are available in the Corporate Governance section of a firm’s
Investor Relations webpage. The
documents were downloaded during the first quarter of 2007. (Thus it is possible that a document
appearing in what we label as 2007 might be from early 2008.)
The S&P500 sample
consists of firms listed in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index on December 31,
2007. Three firms from this group did
not have an ethics code that we could locate and did not respond to e-mail requests
(Harrah’s Entertainment, Tiffany’s and Celgene Corp.). As a result, the S&P500 sample consists
of 497 firms.
The Small Firms sample is
based on 100 firms that have appeared in the bottom decile of market
capitalization for each of the past five years (where deciles cutoffs are based
on NYSE market capitalizations).
For the S&P500 sample,
separate codes specifically pertaining to officers and directors were also
downloaded where available, but this sample is far less complete.
Most of the downloaded
documents are in PDF format. We have
converted all of the original files to text format for research purposes. Most text appearing in pdf graphics is lost
in this conversion process, however this limitation impacts only a trivial
portion of text in any given document. For
textual analysis, most researchers will find the General Employee text files
most relevant.
The file names imbed selected
identification data for each firm. The
file name format is:
sample#_tkr_CIK_PERMNO_SIC_mktcap.filetype
where
|
sample# |
= |
sequence
number |
|
tkr |
= |
SIC
Central Index Key |
|
PERMNO |
= |
CRSP
PERMNO identification number |
|
SIC |
= |
Standard
Industrial Classification number |
|
mktcap |
= |
CRSP
market capitalization (price*shares) on the last trading day of the year |
A detailed description of the
database can be found in Forster,
Loughran, McDonald (2008).
General
Employee
Converted
to text
|
S&P500 |
|
|
100 Small Firms |
Original
|
S&P500 |
|
|
100 Small Firms |
Officer
/ Director
Converted
to text
|
S&P500 |
Original
|
S&P500 |
|
Dictionary
of all words and word counts for the 2007 database
|
Contact: Bill Mcdonald e-mail: mcdonald.1@nd.edu |
© 2008 University of Notre Dame |
|
