Crawling EDGAR

Abstract

While our kids may think this paper is about spiders, it is, unfortunately, about rms in the United States reporting relevant business information to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The paper is meant to serve as a primer for economists in the computing details of searching for information in the Internet. One important goal of the paper is to show how simple open-source computer scripts can be generated to access nancial data on rms that interact with regulators in the United States.