Business entity data for academic research

What is GovFiles?

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GovFiles aggregates business entity records filed with U.S. state Secretary of State offices into eight linked tables covering corporations, LLCs, partnerships, nonprofits, and trade names, both active and dissolved, across all 50 states. A core entity table of more than 75 million companies anchors seven additional tables covering names, addresses, parties, relationships, identifiers, industry codes, and filings, all mapped to a single schema so records join cleanly across every state.

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What academic researchers should know about GovFiles business entity data?

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Each entity carries a stable key built from its jurisdiction code and entity number that joins across all eight tables, from a 220 million row filings table capturing every amendment, name change, and dissolution, to tables for addresses, parties, officers, registered agents, and members, relationships between entities, former legal names, other identifiers, and industry codes. Coverage and field completeness vary by state since each registry publishes different information: most states are fully covered, a handful are still being collected, and a few carry known limits, Alaska covers active entities only, Hawaii's registrations run through 2022, and Ohio starts with entities created after May 2026. Records reach back into the 19th century, and each row carries a retrieval date marker showing exactly when it was pulled from the source registry.

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GovFiles academic research ideas and use cases

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Firm formation and entrepreneurship researchers can use the core entity table to track new business registrations by state, industry, and time period, comparing surges or slowdowns against local economic shocks or policy changes like minimum wage increases or tax reforms.

Firm survival studies get richer with the filings table's 220 million statutory events, which let researchers trace an entity's full lifecycle, amendments, mergers, and dissolutions, rather than relying on formation and dissolution dates alone. Paired with BrightQuery financials, researchers can test which structural factors predict how long a business stays active.

Corporate identity research becomes possible with the names table's 6 million former legal names and DBA aliases, letting researchers track when and how often companies rebrand, adopt trade names, or restructure over time.

Entity resolution and record linkage methodology is a natural fit given GovFiles' stable jurisdiction and entity keys and its 26 million supplemental identifiers, alongside the normalized versus verbatim status and legal form fields, which together offer a ready made benchmark for researchers studying how registry text gets cleaned and standardized.

Corporate network research is possible through the parties and relationships tables, 126 million people and companies tied to entities and 15 million links between entities, which let researchers map recurring officers, registered agents, and affiliated companies to surface shell company clusters or interlocking corporate structures worth studying.

Regional economic geography researchers can combine the addresses table's 112 million entity locations with ATTOM property records or SafeGraph points of interest to study how business density relates to local property values or foot traffic patterns.

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