Markets experienced remarkable expansion in the past half-century, driven by the emergence of new companies, products, services, and technologies. To illustrate this trend, from 1975 to 2022, the global gross domestic product (GDP) per capita surged by an impressive 841%, while the global market cap value skyrocketed by 8,046%. In comparison, within the same period, global inflation increased to a lesser extent according to several indicators (e.g., 371% for HCPI, 388% for FCPI, and 470% for US CPI).

During this same time frame, world development indicators mirrored the economic trend, displaying significant improvements, such as increased life expectancy, reduced infant mortality, enhanced access to potable water, and improvements in the human development index.

Nonetheless, evidence suggests that a significant number of companies worldwide during that expansionist phase, have left collateral effects on their corporate ecosystem components (e.g., investors, suppliers, consumers, environment, employees, etc.). This scenario is not only pernicious to those components individually, but could also, in the long run, lead to the development of a self-destructive pattern within the ecosystem as a whole, akin to what is observed in autophagy.

In today’s world, despite society’s possession of highly advanced diagnostic tools for use in medical, biological, agricultural, and other fields, there is still a lack of precision and accuracy in a diverse range of corporate analyses. This extends from preventing corporate wrongdoings to forecasting the best companies based on the trinomial of profitability, perpetuity, and sustainability. After years of study and experiments, the Corporate Behavior Coding project (CBC) was initiated to address the mentioned intricate scenario in different ways, layers, and instances. Its goal is to demonstrate that, similar to what the Human Genome Project has shown, corporate behavior can also be identified, mapped, and literally codified in its own language based on publicly available information. Through the encoding of corporate behavior, the project has the potential to yield impacts in the legal, academic, regulatory, economic, and governmental fields. This is accomplished by developing more accurate methods to address various matters, as exemplified in the list below:
1. Measure the fair value of a company
2. Identify intangible assets and liabilities overlooked by the market
3. Detect corporate anomalies (e.g., fraud, insolvency events, etc.)
4. Prevent market manipulation or bias in distinct datasets and indicators
5. Forecast corporate and financial indicators
6. Classify corporations for different purposes (e.g., credit, insurance, investment,
etc.)
7. Assist the creation and rotation of asset portfolios
8. Detect functional anomalies in corporate ecosystems, economies, industries or
in the functioning of the judiciary branch
9. Improve the reliability of regulatory disclosures
10. Measure ESG practices in a standardized way applicable to practically all economic segments and company sizes

Depending on the outcomes of CBC research, it also has the potential to evolve into a new autonomous and multidisciplinary field of study at the academic level.

The descriptions of current and past projects of CodeX non-residential fellows are provided to illustrate the kind of work our non-residential fellows are carrying out. These projects are listed here for informational purposes only and are not endorsed by CodeX, Stanford Law School, or Stanford University.