Son Bias in the US: Evidence from Business Names

Are American businesses with the word "son(s)" more common than the word "daughter(s)"? To answer the question, we assemble data on business names. In the US, businesses are registered with the state. And to allow businesses to check whether a particular name is taken, etc., each state provides a way to search for business names. But most states do not allow for sophisticated searches or return all the relevant search results. Because of these reasons, we can only estimate a very conservative lower bound. In all, based on data from 36 states, across states, the median ratio of businesses with the word 'son(s)' in their name to the word 'daughter(s)' is 12:1.

Data, Scripts, Manuscript

• Data

  • All 50 SoS Business Entity Search Links
  • Misc. notes on the data

• Scripts

  • The ipython notebooks are for states where we needed to use a Selenium scraper. The R script is the analysis script.

• Manuscript

Authors

Walter Guillioli and Gaurav Sood