The eight phases trace a question — does state corporate law materially affect firm value? — that the literature has neither settled nor abandoned. Phase 1 presumed the answer was yes. Phases 2 through 4 took the question to the data, ran the empirical machinery available at each moment, and produced contested findings. Phase 5 dismantled the most ambitious affirmative claims on methodological grounds. Phase 6 changed the question by introducing segmentation. Phase 7, in Robert Rhee's 2023 article, advanced the strongest negative claim the literature has yet produced. Phase 8 — the Delaware-Exit moment, beginning in January 2024 — is the live test of every prior phase against firm-by-firm evidence.
The cohort dataset on this site is one input into that test. The cohort of 83 tracked firms — 66 of which have reached legal effectiveness as of the August 4, 2026 dataset — and the announcement-window battery built on it do not by themselves resolve the relevance question. What they do is provide a clean, audited, primary-source-linked record of what happened, against which any of the six post-Rhee camps can run their preferred specifications. The headline result — a mean abnormal return of approximately negative 0.22 percent with a p-value of approximately 0.60 — is the answer the data give to the question Rhee asked: across the cohort moving out of Delaware, the announcement-window market reaction is statistically indistinguishable from zero. That finding is consistent with an irrelevance interpretation and inconsistent with a large, uniform, announcement-day governance discount under the Tracker's specifications, but it is one cohort, one episode, and one set of specifications, and the conversation will continue.