M.A. Thomas
Associate Professor of International Development
The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)
The Johns Hopkins University
Scholars and practitioners are expressing concerns about the impact of unprecedented levels of government contracting on economic and political concentrations of power and on government accountability and transparency. Understanding the total organizational structure of government contractors is key to many of their concerns, such as identifying and resolving organizational conflicts of interest. Until recently, there was little publicly available information on the ownership of government contractors. However, a government database includes partial information, allowing the first visualizations of these ownership structures by means of a STATA program that exports to Netdraw or Pajek.
Visualization thanks to Netdraw by Steve Borgatti.
Find the paper "Identity and Ownership in Government Contracting" here.
Find the STATA do file here: cnes3.do.txt. Click on the link to open it as a text file; then save it to your computer as cnes3.do. This program takes usaspending.gov data as input and attempts to identify the components; allows export of components or their members to Netdraw or Pajek.
Find the STATA do file here: cnes3utilities.do.txt. Click on the link to open it as a text file; then save it to your computer as cnes3utilities.do. For convenience, this is a subset of cnes3 containing only utilities for data exploration and data output once the data file has been generated.
Find the Gsplit file here and save as usaspending.gsc. This file sets key preferences for using Gsplit on usaspending.gov data.
Find the documentation for the program here.
Find a sample CNES output file (for all 2011 contractors) here: All2011contracts.csv. This file is in csv tab-delimited format for import into STATA. It was produced using the name-based matching option. NOTE: This file is 24MB.
Please be aware that this software is offered *free* under a GNU Public License and so is not subject to any warranty. Ownership structures can change rapidly and the data is known to be of poor quality. Accordingly all networks extracted must be independently confirmed by other means.
Unfortunately, I am unable to offer technical support. However, please send bug reports or suggestions for upgrades to bug @ usgcontractors.info (without the spaces) and I will attempt to address them in future versions.
This project was entirely self financed, including purchase of hardware and software. If you find this software useful, a donation through Paypal would be gratefully accepted.