Searching in Metropolitan Areas

Its not unusual for corporations in the United States to be physically located well outside the limits of any city they may be best associated with. Consider tech parks and rural campuses. Individual zip codes, cities, counties or even state borders may be insufficient to represent a reporter’s geographic interests. It was with this in mind that we included point and range criteria in our first geographic search release this month. But its not necessarily easy to define these criteria without additonal mapping tools or trial and error. One source of help might be the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) as defined by the US Office of Management and Budget:

Metropolitan Statistical Areas have at least one urbanized area of 50,000 or more population, plus adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting ties.¹

The US Census Bureau publishes cartographic boundary shapefiles for these same MSAs. Here is a rendered excerpt from the densely populated US Northeast²:

While these areas are defined by irregular polygons, we were able to compute an approximate minimal bounding circle for each of the 381 MSAs in the US, with center point and radius (range). Below is an alphabetical list of these. Click on an MSA to add it to your locations list and search for all contained SEC filings. You can adjust the name or range as desired and save the location for future use.

Please let us know if you find these MSAs a useful approximation of your geographic areas of interest. In the future we might add a built in lookup facility for these MSAs, but we want to make them available now.