This repository contains the main industry-level measures used in Corporate Flexibility in a Time of Crisis by John W. Barry, Murillo Campello, John R. Graham and Yueran Ma, along with the code to reproduce them.

Industry measures

Please read Section 2 of the paper and specifically the Data Appendix (Appendix C of the Internet Appendix for more detail on construction. The four measures included here are:

• Workplace Flexibility - four-digit NAICS measure of ability to move to a remote working environment
  • The main measure of workplace flexibility is named workfromhome
• Investment Flexibility - four-digit NAICS measure of flexibility with respect to speed of completion of investment projects
  • The main measure of investment flexibility is named flex_speed
• Customer Interactions - four-digit NAICS measure of importance of interactions with customers/consumers to a firm's business that captures both direct customer interactions and "indirect" customer interactions (i.e., the importance of direct customer interactions of downstream industries)
  • The main measure of customer interactions is cust_int_tot, which is a weighted average of the direct and indirect measures of customer interactions
• Fixed Cost Share - four-digit NAICS measure of the relative importance of fixed costs (to variable costs) for a firm's business
  • The main measure of fixed cost share is named fc_ind

Code

All code is contained in subdirectory Code:

• download_data.py contains functions that download the raw data needed for each measure.
• workplace_flex.py contains functions that build the workplace flexibility measure
• investment_flex.py contains functions that build the investment flexibility measure
  • Please note: the underlying data to build this measure comes from the Duke/CFO survey, which is not available publicly, so only the code to produce the measure and the measure itself are included.
• customer_interactions.py contains functions that build the customer interactions measure (direct, indirect, and combined)
• fixed_cost_share.py contains functions that build the fixed cost share measure
• runfile.py downloads the data and then compiles the four measures

Replication instructions

Download and run code

1. Download (or clone) this repository.
2. Open a prompt and navigate to the folder location on your machine
3. Run pip install -r requirements.txt, or install the packages wrds and pyDataverse yourself (if you do not have them already).
4. Either open runfile.py in your Python IDE, or enter python runfile.py in your prompt
5. The raw data will then download to directory Data and the industry measures will download and overwrite the files in Out_Data