Corporate hierarchy

A corporate hierarchy is the ownership structure of a company group: a parent owns subsidiaries, which may own further subsidiaries, up to an ultimate parent with no parent of its own. Linking records through it lets data about a subsidiary or brand be rolled up to its group.

Parents, subsidiaries and brands

Three terms are easy to confuse. A subsidiary is a separate legal entity owned by a parent. A brand is a name under which a company sells; it has no legal existence of its own and can belong to a parent or to a subsidiary. A parent can be direct, the next company up the chain, or ultimate, the company at the top. The Global LEI System records both kinds on the basis of accounting consolidation, in its Level 2 data on who owns whom.

Rolling data up to the group

To roll a measure up, map each subsidiary or brand record to its parent's identifier and group by that identifier. Three errors recur:

• Using today's ownership for old periods counts an acquired company's history inside its new parent before the deal. That is a look-ahead error, and the cure is ownership as it stood on each date, as in point-in-time data.
• Counting a record under both the parent and the brand double counts it.
• Dropping records that have no parent hides them, so keep them and mark them unmapped.

In Fokals data

The index holds listed companies, the brands they own and verified private companies, and each company has one stable company ID. A brand or subsidiary carries the identifiers of its listed parent, so rows can be rolled up to the parent by grouping on an identifier such as the ISIN:

select isin, day, sum(open_postings) as group_open_postings
from company_hiring_daily
where isin is not null
group by isin, day;

Check a few groups by hand before relying on a sum. Fokals delivers the link from each brand or subsidiary to its listed parent, with the parent's LEI, ISIN and ticker, so a group rolls up on the identifier you already use. The relationship data of the Global LEI System is the standard reference for direct and ultimate parents. The page for investors describes identifier mapping, and the use case on mapping alternative data to a security master covers the join.

Related terms

• Entity resolution: the process that links records to one company before they are rolled up.
• Company identifier: the codes a parent and its brands share in the data.
• Security master: the reference table of securities that a group's data joins to.
• LEI: the identifier of a legal entity, which the Level 2 data links to its parents.

Frequently asked questions

The queries and code on this page are examples to adapt. Test them in your own environment before you rely on them.