The data on Form D filings was made available from a FOIA request with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2018. The data is used in the paper "The Deregulation of the Private Equity Markets and the Decline in IPOs" by Ewens and Farre-Mensa (2020) to study the impact of regulatory changes to Regulation D and was originally part of an analysis (Figure 2, page 10) done by the SEC "Capital Raising in the U.S.: An Analysis of the Market for Unregistered Securities Offerings, 2009-2014"(pdf). Vladimir Ivanov was instrumental in helping us acquire the data.
The data has the following structure:
cik: Central Index Key (CIK)Sub_Type: filing type (e.g. REGDEX or D)File_No: internal SEC number for filingExemps: comma separated list of Reg D exemption codes see this description for 2019year: filing yearissuer: company or fund namefile_date: filing dateexemption: the main exemption used (6 = "06"). The 'exemps' column may list multiple, but this column takes the "max" where 6 subsumes 5 and 5 subsumes 4.
Users of the data should be aware that many of the filers are funds or investment companies. These are not indicated with a variable, so some string searches are required to remove or flag them (e.g. "funds", "credit", "investments", "iii", "ix", etc.).
If you use this data, please cite:
@article{ewens2020deregulation,
title={The deregulation of the private equity markets and the decline in IPOs},
author={Ewens, Michael and Farre-Mensa, Joan},
journal={The Review of Financial Studies},
volume={33},
number={12},
pages={5463--5509},
year={2020},
publisher={Oxford University Press}
}Ewens, Michael, and Joan Farre-Mensa. "The deregulation of the private equity markets and the decline in IPOs." The Review of Financial Studies 33, no. 12 (2020): 5463-5509.
The following figure reports the number of non-fund filings by exemption 506 vs other exemption types around the passage of NSMIA:
