Now that we are through the hurdle of our last software release we have shifted our focus to data enhancements.   This has been fascinating as we have worked on developing processes to add additional values to our existing data collection tables.

Our initial effort has been focused on adding AGE, TENURE and OTHER_DIRECTORSHIPS to the director compensation data.  Our focus for OTHER_DIRECTORSHIPS is on other public companies.  Specifically we are using our deep collection of director compensation data to match directors across registrants – when a director is included in another entities compensation table we are adding the CIK of the other entity as a field in their compensation data.

Today was the first chance we have had to take a look at the data and it is interesting.  Our initial universe was limited to the 4,045 registrants that have reported director compensation since January 1, 2018.

Out of 4,045 in the initial group – 2,920 registrants have at least one director that is also a director for another company in that group of 4,045.  1,874 registrants have at least one director that has at least two other directorships.  807 of our 4,045 have at least one director that has at least three other directorships.  287 of our sample have at least one director with four or more other directorships.

There are some interesting research questions that should be considered about these companies that have busier directors than others.   By the same token – what about those companies that do not have any directors with current positions at other public companies?

With respect to the directors – the breakdown is as follows:

I of course had to do a Google search for details about the person who has nine total directorships (that we have found so far) in 2017.  He is involved with an interesting group of companies – his total reported compensation for these 9 registrants was 1,383,896.

But of course it is never that easy.  When I sorted the data to align this mystery director’s compensation I noticed that he had two rows of identical data – that is each component of compensation matched across these two different CIKs. With a little more research I learned that these two CIKs had a parent-sub relationship.  One of the entities has traded common stock and the other has public debt.  So for practical purposes our mystery director only has eight unique directorships – not the nine indicated by the CIK distribution.

To give you a teaser for the presentation of this new data I have included an image from part of Abbott Labs (CIK:1800) data with these enhancements.  The columns circled in red are new.