DOI: 10.6078/d1610g
title: Dodd Frank financial reform at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC): Public comments, January 14th, 2010 – July 16th, 2014

description: This dataset includes a complete record of the 36,066 public comments
 submitted to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response
 to notices of proposed rule-making (NPRMs) implementing the Dodd-Frank Act
 over a 42-month period (January 14, 2010 to July 16, 2014). The data was
 exported from the agency’s internal database by the CFTC and provided to
 the authors by email correspondence following a cold call to the CFTC
 public relations department. The source internal database is maintained by
 the CFTC as part of its internal compliance with the Administrative
 Procedures Act (APA) and includes all rule-making notices that appear in
 the Federal Register. Owing to the salience and publicity of the
 Dodd-Frank Act, the CFTC made a special tag in its database for all
 comments submitted in response to rules proposed under the authority of
 the Dodd-Frank Act. This database thus includes all comments which the
 CFTC considers relevant to the Dodd-Frank reform. In short, the CFTC gave
 the authors all comments related to the implementation of Dodd-Frank that
 it received between January 14th, 2010 and July 16th, 2014. Please note
 that this dataset includes only public domain data from the CFTC (under
 the stipulations of the APA, all comments must be published in the Federal
 Register and thus become public domain information). It should be noted
 that the CFTC does have additional meta-data which they declined to rovide
 (i.e. IP addresses for commenters and other personally identifiable
 information) which they noted could be obtained through a Freedom of
 Information Act (FOIA) request. We did not pursue this avenue, but future
 researchers interested in, for example, the geographic distribution of
 commenters could request such data by using a FOIA request.
description: This dataset was exported by the CFTC from their internal
 database of public comments in response to NPRMs. The uploaded file is the
 exact raw data generated by the CTFC and provided to the
 authors. An updated version of the data file including
 the author's classifications based on the organization value will be
 uploaded when the related work is accepted for publication.
description: # Dodd Frank Financial Reform at the CFTC - Public Comments, January 14th,
 2010 to July 16th, 2014 ##
 Description of the data and file structure NOTE: The Comment Text
 ( and variables) are longer than
 the maximum character count of Microsoft Excel cells (32,767 characters).
 All analysis should take this into account and import the .txt file
 directly into your analysis program (R, Stata, etc.) rather than attempt
 to edit or modify the data in Excel before using computational analysis.
 There are two files provided: 1. DoddFrankCommentsAll(uncompressed).txt -
 the full raw data file from the CFTC internal database of all 36,066
 comments on NPRMs 2. (2014-07-30) CFTC Original Codebook.xlsx - the
 codebook provided by the CTFC with the raw data. Originally provided as
 email text, formatted in Excel by authors. Codebook:  | Variable |
 Explanation | | :--------------- |
 :-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ControlNumberID  | CFTC assigned control number; unique to each comment | | SubmitDate  | Date comment was submitted to CFTC. For comments from the 2010 and early 2011 timeframe, this may be the date the comment was uploaded by CFTC staff, rather than the original submission date. | | UniqueName  | This is the Federal Register citation (volume and page number, e.g., XX FR XXXX) tying a comment to the published rulemaking document to which it pertains. | | FirstName  | Commenter first name. | | LastName  | Commenter last name. | | Organization  | Commenter organization (if supplied) | | Title  | As noted above, some “comments” are actually records of an ex parte meeting related to a rulemaking. For such items, this column generally indicates who the meeting was with. | | CommentText  | This is any data entered by a commenter in the Comment field of the CFTC’s web submission form. This will be the same data that is in the ExtractedText field (see below), if that is all the user entered and they did not attach a document to the submission form. That will also be the case for some older comments that were manually entered on the website by CFTC staff. | | ExtractedText  | This is the text pulled from any document that a commenter attached to the CFTC’s web submission form. | ## Sharing/Access information n/a ## Code/Software n/a