SMU Cox · Corporate Governance Initiative
In active development — the full study publishes on this page.
When a company changes its state of incorporation, or a state rewrites its corporate law, does the stock market actually react? We are measuring it, rigorously — isolating each firm's own stock-price response to the legal change, against carefully matched comparison firms, over both days and months.
What we're building
Each method below is the academic tool we use, paired with a plain-English gloss of what it does and why it matters. The study is designed to the standard of a top finance journal: neutral, pre-specified, and honest about what the data can and cannot tell us.
In plain English —We strip out what the whole market did on the same days, so we isolate each firm's own reaction to the legal change rather than crediting it for moves everyone made.
In plain English —Every firm is judged against look-alike peers — companies of similar size, industry, and profile — not against the market average, so the comparison is apples-to-apples.
In plain English —How an investor actually would have done holding the stock over months, not just the day or two around the announcement — the long game, not the headline.
In plain English —We test whether the firms that choose to move are already different in hidden ways — differences that could make a naive before-and-after comparison look like a reaction when it isn't.
In plain English —We report what we genuinely can and cannot detect, run the same tests on fake "events" to check for false signals, and don't cherry-pick the window that flatters a result.
The analysis is in active development. When it is complete, the results, charts, and full methodology will appear on this page — presented in the same plain-English, source-linked style as the rest of the Reincorporation Index.
Bookmark this page and check back — we would love to have you return when the study goes live.
Explore the Reincorporation Index → Browse the live tracker, firm registry, and SMU CGI research while the study is finalized · SMU Corporate Governance Initiative