Large-Scale Open Corporate Data Collection and Analysis as an Enabler of Corporate Social Responsibility Research

During the last years, citizens and transparency initiatives put increasing pressure on governments, organizations, and companies to be more transparent and to publicize information pertaining to their operations. Although several organizations have started engaging in open data practices, data quality, structure and availability is still highly inconsistent across organizations, which makes it challenging and effort-intensive to obtain and analyze large-scale high-quality datasets. To this end, this paper examines how publicly available financial and corporate data can be leveraged to extract useful inferences regarding the financial and social performance of companies. Numerous reports have been collected from the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and analyzed to study hypotheses regarding the corporate practices and social responsibility of companies.