UNIQUE HAND-COLLECTED DATASET ON BOARDS OF DIRECTORS
I own a dataset that contains detailed data on board committees (all committees), committee memberships, and director bios of every U.S. public company (including non-S&P 1500 firms) from 1994 to 2011. Here are some sample data files: committee memberships, and committee descriptions. This dataset is used extensively in the Journal of Corporate Finance paper (with Jason Turkiela) on the concentration of authority within boards and variability in firm performance.
See Appendix B of the paper for a detailed comparison of the differences between my dataset, ISS RiskMetrics, and BoardEx on committee membership data.
TIPS FOR COLLECTING DATA FROM SEC FILINGS
The following tips may be useful for researchers planning to hand collect data from SEC filings:
1. The SEC provides a comprehensive index of all company filings at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/full-index/. Choose the folder of the year you wish to collect data, download the file company.idx from all 4 quarters of the year and save them in a local folder. File names should be in the format of YYYY_Q_company.idx (2001_1_company.idx for the first quarter of 2001 file).
2. You can use the SAS code in this file to import the SEC index into SAS formatted data.
3. To merge with Compustat, you can use the CIK-gvkey mapping provided by the Compustat database. Please note that this mapping contains the current links and not historical links. Manual checks are necessary for companies that have been acquired or merged with other firms. WRDS does provide a mapping file with historical links between CIK and gvkey.