Mining Executive Compensation Data from SEC Filings

In recent years, corporate governance has become an important concern in investment decision-making. As one of the most important factors in evaluating corporate governance, executive compensation study has drawn a lot of attention. Most companies with excessive executive pay are linked with scandals or corporate failures. This paper presents a text mining system ECRS (Executive Compensation Retrieval System) to automatically extract executive compensation data from the SEC (http://www.sec.gov) proxy filing. An analysis based on the extracted data is provided and some samples on using the raw data to derive useful information for the financial analysts are also presented