Development status & reliance disclaimer
This website is a pre-release research and development environment. Nothing on it has been finalized, peer-reviewed in published form, or cleared for citation. Treat every page as a working draft.
What this site is
The SMU Corporate Governance Institute Reincorporation Tracker is an ongoing empirical and doctrinal research project documenting U.S. publicly traded firms that have changed their state of incorporation, with a focus on the post-Tornetta wave. The project is led by Shane Goodwin, PhD (Executive Director, Corporate Governance Institute; Professor of Practice in Finance, SMU Cox School of Business; Adjunct Professor of Law, SMU Dedman School of Law).
What this site is not
- Not a published work. Pages are working drafts. Numbers, charts, citations, and conclusions are being iterated.
- Not a primary source. Every claim that depends on a SEC filing, court case, or statute links back to the primary source — use that, not this site, in any cited work.
- Not legal, investment, or accounting advice. Nothing on this site constitutes advice. Consult your own counsel and advisors.
- Not an SMU institutional position. Views and analyses are those of the research team and do not represent the official position of Southern Methodist University, the Cox School of Business, the Dedman School of Law, or the Corporate Governance Institute as an institutional body.
- Not a live regulatory dashboard. Although the Texas Business Court (TBC) monitor and reincorporation tracker are designed to update on a schedule, monitoring lag is possible and content may be stale at any given moment.
Standard of work (project standing rules)
The project commits to the following internal standards. These are targets the team is working toward; not every page meets every standard yet, which is one reason this site is in development.
- Triple-verified numbers. Numerical results aim for reproducibility across Python, R, and Stata within documented tolerances (point estimates ±0.5 pp; p-values ±0.05; R² ±0.01; donor weights ±5 pp).
- Source-linked everywhere. Every assertion that depends on a SEC filing, court case, statute, or news article links to a primary source. EDGAR-direct URLs for filings. Statute citations in Bluebook 21st format.
- Dynamic-everything architecture. Numbers are computed from a canonical data file, not hardcoded into pages. When a number on the page looks wrong, it usually means the canonical workbook needs to be edited, not the page itself.
- Zero-fabrication protocol on filings. No AI-generated summary of an SEC filing substitutes for the filing text itself.
- Fact-based voice. Pages describe; named scholars opine in their own attributed work.
Known limitations as of this version
| Category | Status |
|---|---|
| Cohort data | Active. Firms move through SCHEDULED → APPROVED → COMPLETED as filings progress. |
| Texas Business Court monitor | Ingestion pipeline in iteration; back-fill of older opinions ongoing. |
| Event-study results | Per-firm replication kits being staged behind /firms/<ticker>_replication/. |
| Statutory citations | Post-SB 1057 TBOC text cross-referenced; Bluebook compliance under continuous audit. |
| Scholar profiles | Descriptive text verified against each scholar's home institution; corrections welcome. |
Reviewer notice
If you are reviewing this site at the invitation of the research team: thank you. The team welcomes corrections, citation challenges, and methodology questions. Send feedback to sgoodwin@smu.edu. Please flag broken links, numerical inconsistencies, miscited scholars, and any place where the site voice strays into advocacy.
Citation request
Please do not cite this site as a published work. If you need a citable version of any analysis on this site, contact the project lead and a working-paper version will be provided.
Copyright & reuse
© 2026 Shane Goodwin / SMU Corporate Governance Institute. All rights reserved during the development phase. Reuse of figures, tables, or analysis requires written permission. Primary-source documents (SEC filings, statutes, court opinions) are not subject to this notice and should be retrieved from their canonical sources.