RESOURCES

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, I rely on information that is readily available online. As with any work based on research, it is certain that others would draw different conclusions from the data I use. To make it easier to verify or criticize, interested readers, especially journalists and researchers, will find the following resources particularly helpful.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS is the authoritative source on employment statistics in the US, including historical information about employment within each industry: http://www.bls.gov/data/.

Securities and Exchange Commision. The SEC’s EDGAR contains securities filings for corporations listed on US stock markets, starting for most in 1994. The 10-K (annual report) contains financial and employment information. The DEF 14A (proxy statement) includes information about corporate officers and directors as well as corporate ownership. The S-1 (IPO prospectus) describes how voting rights are allocated, among other things. Filings by particular companies are available at http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html.

Wharton Research Data Services. More comprehensive annual financial and accounting information on US corporations, often going back to 1950, is available at the WRDS (for a fee) at https://wrds-web.wharton.upenn.edu/wrds/.

Mergent. Prior to online data sources, Moody’s Industrial Manuals provided compilations of corporate financial and management information beginning in roughly 1900. Many of these old sources are archived in accessible form at http://www.mergentonline.com/login.php.

Initial public offerings. The best source of data on IPOs in the United States is provided by Professor Jay Ritter at the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida: https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ipo-data/.

World Bank. The World Bank compiles hundreds of economic and social variables annually for every country, often as far back as 1960, in its World Development Indicators database: http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators.

United Nations Development Programme. The UNDP’s Human Development Reports data complement the World Bank data in providing more detailed indicators of human well-being around the world: http://hdr.undp.org/en/data.

Income inequality. Three sources of cross-national data on inequality for extended time periods are the Standardized World Income Inequality Database at the University of Iowa (http://myweb.uiowa.edu/fsolt/swiid/swiid.html), the United Nations World Income Inequality Database (https://www.wider.unu.edu/project/wiid-world-income-inequality-database), and the Luxembourg Income Study Database (http://www.lisdatacenter.org/).