Over the last 23 years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has required over 34,000 companies to file over 165,000 annual reports. These reports, the so-called "Form 10-Ks," contain a characterization of a company's financial performance and its risks, including the regulatory environment in which a company operates. In this paper, we analyze over 4.5 million references to U.S. Federal Acts and Agencies contained within these reports to build a mean-field measurement of temperature and diversity in this regulatory ecosystem  . While individuals across the political, economic, and academic world frequently refer to trends in this regulatory ecosystem, there has been far less attention  paid to supporting such claims with large-scale, longitudinal data. In this paper, we document an increase in the regulatory energy per filing, i.e., a warming "temperature." We also find that the diversity of the regulatory ecosystem has been increasing over the past two decades, as measured by the dimensionality of the regulatory space and distance between the "regulatory bitstrings" of companies. This measurement framework and its ongoing application contribute an important step towards improving academic and policy discussions around legal complexity and the regulationof large-scale human techno-social systems .
Over the last 23 years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has required over 34,000 companies to file over 165,000 annual reports. These reports, the so-called "Form 10-Ks," contain a characterization of a company's financial performance and its risks, including the regulatory environment in which a company operates. In this paper, we analyze over 4.5 million references to U.S. Federal Acts and Agencies contained within these reports to build a mean-field measurement of temperature and diversity in this regulatory ecosystem , where companies URLanisms inhabiting the regulatory environment . While individuals across the political, economic, and academic world frequently refer to trends in this regulatory ecosystem, far less attention has been paid to supporting such claims with large-scale, longitudinal data. In this paper, we document an increase in the regulatory energy per filing, i.e., a warming "temperature." We also find that the diversity of the regulatory ecosystem has been increasing over the past two decades, as measured by the dimensionality of the regulatory space and distance between the "regulatory bitstrings" of companies. These findings support the claim that regulatory activity and complexity are increasing, and this measurement framework contributes an important step towards improving academic and policy discussions around legal complexity and regulation .
A
, where companies URLanisms inhabiting the regulatory environment
D
there has been
A
has been
R
This measurement framework and its ongoing application contribute
These findings support the claim that regulatory activity and complexity are increasing, and this measurement framework contributes
R
the regulationof large-scale human techno-social systems
regulation