What Do Private Firms Look Like?

Asker, John; Farre-Mensa, Joan; Ljungqvist, Alexander

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What Do Private Firms Look Like?

NYU Working Paper No. 2451/31351

36 Pages Posted: 14 Dec 2011

See all articles by John Asker

Joan Farre-Mensa

University of Illinois at Chicago - Department of Finance

Alexander Ljungqvist

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); Swedish House of Finance; European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

There are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: December 2011

Abstract

Private firms in the U.S. are not subject to public reporting requirements, so relatively little is known about their characteristics and behavior – until now. This Data Appendix describes a new database on private U.S. firms, created by Sageworks Inc. in cooperation with hundreds of accounting firms. The contents of the Sageworks database mirror Compustat, the standard database for public U.S. firms. It contains balance sheet and income statement data for 95,297 private firms covering 250,507 firms-years over the period 2002 to 2007. We compare this database to the joint Compustat-CRSP database of public firms and to the Federal Reserve’s 2003 National Survey of Small Business Finances.

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Asker, John William and Farre-Mensa, Joan and Ljungqvist, Alexander and Ljungqvist, Alexander, What Do Private Firms Look Like? (December 2011). NYU Working Paper No. 2451/31351, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1972119