Crawling EDGAR

While the title may lead you to think that this paper is about spiders, it is about firms in the United States reporting relevant business information to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The paper is meant to serve as a primer for economists in the computing details of searching for information on the Internet. One important goal of the paper is to show how simple open-source computer scripts can be generated to access financial data on firms that interact with regulators in the United States.