Two things that fascinate me are geography and finance. So, for the next few posts, I’m going to look at where publicly-traded companies are headquartered. More specifically, I’m going to try to discover if headquartering a company in a given state actually helps that state’s economy as a whole. This question struck me after reading about Illinois’ battle to keep Sears’ headquarters in Chicago.

This is a tricky question, so a lack of time and access to data may foil the effort. Nevertheless, I suspect we’ll discover a few interesting things along the way.

To get started, I identified several thousand tickers from the S&P 1500, the Wilshire 5000, and the Russell 3000. Then, I screen-scraped market capitalization and company headquarter data from Yahoo! Finance. The screen-scrape failed in some instances, while other companies were based outside of the U.S. This left a list of 3,652 companies with a total market capitalization of $15.3 trillion dollars. According to one source, the total market cap of US-listed companies is around $15 to $20 trillion, so it would seem we’ve captured something north of 75% of US-listed, US-based companies by market cap.

So, where are these companies based? Using Google Fusion Tables, I was able to generate the following maps. First, we have total market cap by state, ranging from Alaska ($708M) and Wyoming ($1.4B) to NY ($2.2T) and CA ($2.9T). Oregon and Wisconsin are solidly in the middle, with about $100B each:

Market Cap of Public Companies by State of HQ

Of course, this isn’t really fair to places like Wyoming and Alaska. After all, we’re talking about states that have populations of around 600,000, and comparing them to states with 19M (NY), 23M (TX), and 36M (CA). A little more interesting is to map market capitalization per capita. Here’s what that looks like:

Per Capita Market Cap of Public Companies by State of HQ 

Unsurprisingly, states like California ($80,000 of market cap per capita) and New York (#1, at $114K) still fare well. Some other states, however, punch way above their weight: Arkansas ($97K; thanks, WMT), Delaware ($93K; no surprise), and New Jersey ($90K). States at the bottom of the list include New Mexico ($829), Alaska ($906), and West Virginia ($2,372). For reference, the full table is below.

That’s it for this week — but we’re off to a good start. I’m going to try to update this post later with links to interactive Fusion Tables, and watch out for a follow-up soon.