21st Century Corporate Financial Fraud, United States, 2005-2010 (ICPSR 37328)
Version Date: Jun 29, 2021 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
Darrell Steffensmeier, Pennsylvania State University. Sociology Department;
Jennifer Schwartz, Washington State University
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37328.v1
Version V1
Summary View help for Summary
The Corporate Financial Fraud project is a study of company and top-executive characteristics of firms that ultimately violated Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) financial accounting and securities fraud provisions compared to a sample of public companies that did not. The fraud firm sample was identified through systematic review of SEC accounting enforcement releases from 2005-2010, which included administrative and civil actions, and referrals for criminal prosecution that were identified through mentions in enforcement release, indictments, and news searches. The non-fraud firms were randomly selected from among nearly 10,000 US public companies censused and active during at least one year between 2005-2010 in Standard and Poor's Compustat data. The Company and Top-Executive (CEO) databases combine information from numerous publicly available sources, many in raw form that were hand-coded (e.g., for fraud firms: Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAER) enforcement releases, investigation summaries, SEC-filed complaints, litigation proceedings and case outcomes). Financial and structural information on companies for the year leading up to the financial fraud (or around year 2000 for non-fraud firms) was collected from Compustat financial statement data on Form 10-Ks, and supplemented by hand-collected data from original company 10-Ks, proxy statements, or other financial reports accessed via Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR), SEC's data-gathering search tool. For CEOs, data on personal background characteristics were collected from Execucomp and BoardEx databases, supplemented by hand-collection from proxy-statement biographies.
Citation View help for Citation
Export Citation:
Funding View help for Funding
Subject Terms View help for Subject Terms
Geographic Coverage View help for Geographic Coverage
Smallest Geographic Unit View help for Smallest Geographic Unit
United States
Restrictions View help for Restrictions
Access to these data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement, specify the reason for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.
Distributor(s) View help for Distributor(s)
Time Period(s) View help for Time Period(s)
Date of Collection View help for Date of Collection
Sample View help for Sample
The data include all securities and accounting fraud violations by US public companies for which the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued one or more enforcement releases during 2005-2010. Enforcement releases were aggregated to the case-level and assigned to the primary company under investigation, resulting in 333 fraud firms with violations initiated between 1997 and 2010. The non-fraud control group of 724 companies was randomly selected from among 9,991 public firms in existence at least one year during 2000-2005 in Standard and Poor's Compustat database on public companies, after excluding broker-dealers and non-traded securities, foreign-incorporated entities, and firms not reporting total assets or 2-digit industry.
Universe View help for Universe
US-incorporated public companies under Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) jurisdiction and company-CEOs
Unit(s) of Observation View help for Unit(s) of Observation
Data Type(s) View help for Data Type(s)
HideOriginal Release Date View help for Original Release Date
2021-06-29
Version History View help for Version History
2021-06-29 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
- Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.
Notes
The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.
One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.