spb/firc0001_uqo

1% Owner: Agent 10 (Stage E writing). Every generated exhibit is \input exactly once in the prose at the anchor2% where it is discussed; please do not add a second \input of the same float (duplicate labels). — 2026-11-053% ============================================================================4\section{Research Applications and Identification Limits}\label{sec:applications}5% ============================================================================67\subsection{What the database can support}89Four families of empirical designs are natural once the validation gates are passed; each is listed with the restriction it must respect now.1011\paragraph{Project counts and composition as firm-year variables.} The issuer-year count of newly observed projects, by category, is a text-derived measure of disclosed strategic activity comparable in spirit to the thematic scores of the factor layer but with a discrete, interpretable unit. Because the panel is a snapshot universe, firm fixed effects and within-firm comparisons are safer than cross-sectional levels, and the later entry of smaller issuers (\Cref{fig:coverage}) should be modeled explicitly. Two further restrictions follow from this revision: the count must be computed under a stated key and reported with its range (\Cref{sec:speccurve}), and the S\&P~500 cohort must carry a run indicator, since its mentions come from two runs and two 10-K segmenters and its per-issuer counts move by tens of projects depending on which run is counted (\Cref{sec:time}). A firm-year aggregation of mentions also requires the fiscal-year fill exported with the audit outputs, because \texttt{fiscal\_year} is empty for \SPIDfiscalYearNullMentions\ mentions (\Cref{sec:results}).1213\paragraph{Technology adoption and diffusion.} The \texttt{technologies} field and the categories \texttt{ai\_initiative}, \texttt{data\_center}, \texttt{cloud\_migration}, \texttt{automation} and \texttt{erp\_implementation} allow the first-mention date of a technology to be located by issuer, sector and location, in the spirit of \citet{kalyani2025} but from the issuer's own regulatory narrative. The small counts of these categories (a few hundred projects each), the fact that technology tags are free text rather than a controlled vocabulary, and the possibility that up to \SPIDtechRegexEqualPct\% of tag lists were back-filled from the model's description (\Cref{sec:contract}) limit precision; the adoption rates of the Census survey module on advanced technologies \citep{zolas2020} are an external benchmark against which the counts of these categories can be sanity-checked before use, and a mapping of tags to a vocabulary is part of the proposed ontology work.1415\paragraph{Event studies.} Mentions in 8-K filings are dated to the day and are the closest the database comes to an announcement date (\SPIDmentionsStoredEightK\ stored mentions), in the tradition of the announcement-level evidence of \citet{mcconnell1985}. Because the primary document of an 8-K often refers to a press release filed as an exhibit that the pipeline does not read, the first \emph{public} announcement may precede the first mention in the corpus; event dates should be verified against the exhibit or the newswire before use, and the \SPIDfinEightKPct\% of 8-K mentions that match the financing pattern should be excluded or relabeled first.1617\paragraph{Project-level panels.} For projects with several mentions, the timeline provides a sequence of status and amount statements that can be used to study announcement-to-completion durations, budget revisions and abandonment, subject to the caveats on status (last statement, not terminal fate; tie order for \SPIDprojectsStatusTie\ projects), on merged phases (\Cref{sec:resolution_rule}) and on amounts whose source wording, currency and scale are not stored (\Cref{sec:amounts}).1819\subsection{Identification limits}2021\begin{itemize}22\item \textbf{Disclosure, not activity.} The database measures what issuers chose to say in a regulated document. Disclosure thresholds, materiality judgments, boilerplate habits and litigation risk vary by firm, sector and time; a difference in project counts is a difference in disclosure before it is a difference in investment.23\item \textbf{Snapshot universe and sampled proxy.} Survivorship and backfilling are built in, and the proxy omits an unknown subset of the smallest index members (\Cref{sec:sample}). Comparisons across years that mix cohorts of issuers confound activity with the composition of the observed panel.24\item \textbf{Measurement error of unknown structure.} Until the human-coded evaluation is run, extraction precision and recall, category accuracy and linkage error are unknown. The audits of \Cref{sec:validation} show that the error is unlikely to be classical: long sections are read only in part and in document order, so recall falls with section length and with the position of the passage; financing instruments and boilerplate-heavy items are more exposed to false positives; and the project count is partly an artefact of a key whose dominant branch is a generic token. \citet{ludwig2025} set out the correction that a validation subsample permits; until it exists, the counts are descriptive quantities.25\item \textbf{Run and cohort.} The S\&P~500 block was extracted in a different run, with a different 10-K parser and an unknown model snapshot. Any design that compares that cohort with the rest of the universe, or that uses 10-K text features, must condition on the run.26\item \textbf{Amounts.} Disclosed amounts are heterogeneous in type and scope, are never realized expenditure, and carry no source wording, currency or scale; the project-level maximum is a reading convenience, not an estimate, and the tail contains values that typing would most likely reject (\Cref{sec:amounts}).27\item \textbf{Descriptive versus causal.} Associations between project disclosures and outcomes (returns, investment, employment) identify the joint determination of disclosure and outcomes, not the effect of the project. Causal designs require a source of variation in the \emph{project} that is orthogonal to the decision to \emph{describe} it, and the database does not supply one.28\end{itemize}29