The blue sky law changes and state securities law index tells us about the stringency of changes in the state securities laws, but we do not have a clear benchmark from which to compare states. One approach is to run analyses with state fixed effects. As an alternative, we can use the state securities laws for the focal states as of 1947. I did not code up these benchmarks, but users could use these two to produce state-level differences in blue sky laws at the sample’s start.
Baseline laws
Each of these files has several years of each state’s securities law up to 1947. The full Github repository is available here. These are the states where we were able to find the text of the blue sky law in 1947 (hit the download button for the file):