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While one of the SEC's core duties includes the important task of enforcing various securities regulations, "relatively little empirical work exists assessing the choices the SEC makes on enforcement on an ongoing basis." A paucity of readily-available data likely helps stunt such assessments. Even though the SEC reports annual enforcement statistics, the granular, internal information upon which SEC enforcement decisions rest remains largely "opaque to outside observers."

A recent paper, Measuring the Impact of SEC Enforcement Decisions, by Stephen Choi (NYU), seeks to reduce the opacity by generating various SEC enforcement decision metrics that, in turn, might form the foundation for more sophisticated analyses in the future. To this end, Choi brings together 851 SEC enforcement "actions against public companies and subsidiaries of public companies" between 2005 and 2018, inclusive. From this data set Choi descriptively analyses such aspects as SEC enforcement actions and various perspectives on stock price reactions to these SEC actions. While Choi's presentation of data is descriptive, sometimes even the descriptive can identify rich targets for deeper analyses. To illustrate, Figure 3 (below) presents SEC actions, over time, and by month.

As Choi discusses, Figure 3 makes clear something of a "September Swell" and an "October Ebb." While what accounts for these odd ("hockey stick") distributions is not entirely obvious, a picture of the raw distributions across months and over time is necessary to identify the need for a deeper dive. The paper's abstract follows.

“This essay examines several metrics of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decisionmaking that may be updated on a regular basis over time using publicly available data to give a picture of how SEC decisionmaking changes over time. I focus on SEC actions against public companies and subsidiaries of public companies and use data from the 2005 to 2018 period. The metrics include: the number of SEC actions per year and per month, the ratio of SEC actions to securities class actions by year, the mean abnormal return from an event study of the first public announcement of the problem that led to the eventual SEC enforcement action by year, the fraction of SEC actions with prior disclosure of the underlying violation by year, and the variability of the market response to the initiation of a SEC action by year. The metrics cannot demonstrate with certainty what motivates internal SEC enforcement decisions but may raise questions that guide future research.”

Filtered by my admitted soft spot for scholars who engage in the hard, unglamorous, and often under-appreciated tasks incident to data creation/collection, a recent paper taking an initial descriptive cut at some archival probate data caught my eye. In The Demographics of Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth: An Empirical Study of Testacy and Intestacy on Family Property, Danaya Wright (Florida), recognizing that "[e]veryone dies eventually, and the vast majority of us will die owning at least some property," digs into probate record archives to assess various trends. Exploiting all (N=408) estates that went through court-supervised probate in Alachua County (FL) in 2013, the paper focuses on such variables as wealth, age, number of children, race, sex and marital status, with an eye toward potential systematic differences between testate (293) and intestate (115) decedents. The paper reports "clear differences between testate and intestate decedents on the basis of race, sex, wealth, marital status, age, and even children, with testacy correlating to significantly more wealth than intestacy."

Appropriately mindful of data and research design limitations, the paper also conveys a welcome level of cautiousness and modesty in terms of its ability to scaffold firm conclusions. After all, the data used in the paper draw from one year (2013) in a single county in one state (FL). As well, while the paper benefits from all of estates submitted to probate, most (77.3%) of the deaths in Alachua County in 2013 did not trigger probate or were probated elsewhere. While important external validity and selection effects' questions linger, the paper nonetheless illustrates the scholarly potential of exploiting data that too often remain "hidden in plain sight." The paper's abstract follows.

“In this article, I analyze many of the differences between testate and intestate decedents and suggest areas of concern for law- and policy-makers, as well as practicing lawyers and financial planners. Identifying the right demographic at risk for wealth deterioration may allow for interventions that can slow or reverse the widening wealth gap and ultimately help the next few generations build economically stable lives. To that end, I discuss how a number of demographic differences (wealth, age, race, sex, and marital status) affect the downward trajectory of certain groups and the upward trajectory of others.”