The data is a daily time-series of print media coverage of three publicly listed corporations which have specialised to some extent in competing for government contracts. The three companies are Capita PLC, Serco PLC and G4S PLC. The data covers the period from January 1 2005 to June 30 2015. Each entry is an article with information on date, source, number of company mentions, and a human coded measure of article sentiment. Public Service Corporations (PSCs) such as Serco, Capita and G4S are large businesses that are relatively specialised in the delivery of public services. They have been subject to very little direct analysis by policy scholars and this project starts to fill that gap. Over recent years there have been a number of contract failures for example relating to the Olympic security contract, GP out of hours services, allegations of abuse of inmates in immigration detention centres and overcharging on contracts for prisoner tagging. Such failures damage companies’ reputations and may hurt their hopes of further public contracts. This project will analyse the effect on PSC share prices of public scrutiny of failures and controversies. Responsiveness of PSC share price to public scrutiny may constitute a new type of political accountability, giving the corporations incentive to improve performance, or at least avoid public scandal. The effect of public scrutiny on share price may also shape the strategic relationship between Government and its large contractors.
Newspaper articles were downloaded from the Nexis database.The search terms specified two or more mentions of the company or the company name featured in the article title. For G4S, the terms Securicor and Group 4 were also searched because the start of the research period coincides with their merger. A subset of publications were selected for coding and data was entered directly into a spread sheet. Duplicate articles were excluded, as were sponsored articles, and a large number of false positives for the Capita search term and the Group 4 term. We also excluded articles related to security van robberies (mostly associated with the Securicor search term).
