The Form BW-3 Files Dataset is a closed corpus of EDGAR submissions filed by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, the lending arm of the World Bank) under Rule 3 of Regulation BW, the SEC's substitute disclosure regime adopted under Section 15(a) of the Bretton Woods Agreements Act. Each record corresponds to one Form BW-3 submission identified by its 18-digit accession number, capturing a single proposed distribution of primary obligations — that is, the terms, distribution plan, spread table, expenses, and intended use of proceeds for a specific IBRD debt issuance into U.S. capital markets. The dataset covers EDGAR-era BW-3 filings from May 1996 through December 2002, after which this filing channel ceased and the IBRD's U.S. distribution disclosures migrated elsewhere. Records are organized as year-month ZIP containers with one accession-number sub-folder per filing, each holding a metadata.json descriptor and the original SGML-wrapped plain-text documents from the EDGAR submission.
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The dataset captures every Form BW-3 submission accepted by EDGAR during the system's coverage of Regulation BW, from May 1996 through December 2002. Form BW-3 is a transactional report filed pursuant to Rule 3 of Regulation BW, the SEC rulebook governing the IBRD's debt offerings into the United States; each filing reports a proposed distribution of a primary obligation — typically a tranche of Global Notes issued under the Bank's Global Debt Issuance Facility — and is structured as a brief cover letter on Bank letterhead transmitting the formal Rule 3 report describing that issuance. Because the filer population for Form BW-3 is effectively a single supranational issuer, the dataset is best understood as an offering-level archive of IBRD U.S. debt distributions across the EDGAR window rather than an issuer-period panel.
Records are delivered as ZIP containers (YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip) under a top-level form-bw3-files/ folder, with one accession sub-folder per filing inside the relevant year-month directory. For each accession, the dataset includes a metadata descriptor and every primary EDGAR document from the submission except image attachments. The on-the-wire artifacts are SGML-wrapped plain-text documents under EDGAR's pre-modernization filing conventions; the dataset distributes these in two file types — TXT for the BW-3 documents themselves (and, where retained, the complete-submission bundle) and JSON for the per-record metadata file. Filings cease entirely after December 2002, when the SEC's disclosure framework for these World Bank issuances was discontinued, so the dataset is a closed corpus rather than a live stream.
One record in the Form BW-3 Files Dataset corresponds to a single Form BW-3 submission to EDGAR, identified by its 18-digit accession number. On disk, a record is a folder named with the un-dashed accession number (for example, 000091205701533348) holding a metadata.json descriptor and every primary EDGAR document from that submission except image attachments. Logically, a record represents one Rule 3 transactional report filed by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank, CIK 51120) in connection with a specific debt offering placed into U.S. distribution. Because the dataset has effectively one filer across its entire coverage window, each record is best understood as one offering-level disclosure — a single debt distribution event — rather than an issuer-period observation.
Records are organized into year-month ZIP containers (YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip) under a top-level form-bw3-files/ folder, with one accession sub-folder per filing inside the relevant year-month directory.
Form BW-3 is a transactional report filed pursuant to Rule 3 of Regulation BW. Regulation BW was promulgated by the SEC under Section 15(a) of the Bretton Woods Agreements Act and governed the disclosure obligations of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development when offering debt securities in the United States. Every BW-3 in the dataset is a World Bank disclosure tied to a specific debt issuance — most commonly a tranche of Global Notes issued under the Bank's Global Debt Issuance Facility — and is structured as a brief cover letter on Bank letterhead transmitting the formal Rule 3 report describing that issuance.
These filings are administrative debt disclosures rather than registration statements. They sit outside the Securities Act of 1933 / Exchange Act of 1934 registration framework that applies to corporate issuers, because the World Bank, as a supranational entity, is exempt from 1933 Act registration; Regulation BW served as the SEC's substitute disclosure regime for these issuances. The disclosure is narrative-and-tabular plain text describing the terms of one specific debt distribution; the form does not carry financial statements or auditor reports.
A record carries two structural layers:
metadata.json, that captures the EDGAR header for the submission, the filer entity block, the document inventory, and stable identifiers used to anchor the record within the dataset..txt) that hold the actual Rule 3 report and any cover letter, each enclosed in a standard EDGAR <DOCUMENT> envelope.Image attachments that may have accompanied the original submission on EDGAR are excluded from the record by design. The file-types found in the dataset are TXT (the BW-3 documents themselves and, where retained, the complete-submission bundle) and JSON (the per-record metadata file).
metadata.json descriptorThe metadata file mirrors the EDGAR header for the accession and provides the record's stable identifying fields:
formType — always "BW-3".accessionNo — the dashed EDGAR accession number (e.g. 0000912057-01-533348); the on-disk folder uses the un-dashed 18-digit form.filedAt — ISO-8601 filing timestamp with timezone offset (e.g. 2001-09-25T00:00:00-04:00).description — a short human label such as "Form BW-3 - Transactional World Bank filing".linkToFilingDetails — URL of the primary BW-3 document on sec.gov.linkToTxt — URL of the complete-submission text bundle (<accession>.txt) on sec.gov.linkToHtml — URL of the EDGAR filing index page (-index.htm).linkToXbrl — empty string.id — an opaque 32-character hex content hash used as the dataset's stable record identifier.Two array members enumerate the submission's contents:
documentFormatFiles[] — one entry per submitted document, with sequence (string-typed index, with the complete-submission bundle taking a blank sequence), size (byte size as string), documentUrl (direct sec.gov URL), description (often "BW-3" or "Complete submission text file"), and type (the EDGAR document type, e.g. "BW-3").entities[] — the filer entity block. For every record this is the World Bank, with cik "51120", companyName "INTERNATIONAL BANK FOR RECONSTRUCTION & DEVELOPMENT (Filer)", entity-level type "BW-3", act (Exchange Act designation, e.g. "34"), fileNo (SEC file number, e.g. "083-00003"), filmNo (EDGAR film number), sic with code and label ("6022 State Commercial Banks"), and fiscalYearEnd (MMDD, e.g. "0630").Two further arrays — seriesAndClassesContractsInformation[] and dataFiles[] — appear in the descriptor schema but are empty for BW-3, because the form is a debt-issuance report rather than an investment-company filing and is not paired with structured data attachments.
Each non-image document from the original submission is preserved as a plain-text file (filenames typically follow a pattern such as a2059865zbw-3.txt). The file opens with the standard EDGAR <DOCUMENT> envelope:
<TYPE> — BW-3 for the primary document.<SEQUENCE> — numeric position within the submission (1 for the lead document).<FILENAME> — the original EDGAR filename.<DESCRIPTION> — short label, commonly BW-3.<TEXT> — opens the document body; closed by </TEXT>, then </DOCUMENT>.<PAGE> markers delimit page breaks within the body. The body itself is monospace plain text laid out as a letter or report, not HTML or XML.
The substantive disclosure is the Rule 3 report. Where the lead document is a transmittal letter, the report is filed as a separate <DOCUMENT> in the same submission. Across the BW-3 corpus, the report is organized into the following sections, generally in this order:
FILE NO. 1-3431), the regulatory citation (REGULATION BW, RULE 3), the date, and the addressee (the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance).The transmittal cover letter that precedes the report carries the date, the SEC file number, the regulatory citation, a one-paragraph description of the offering being reported (currency, principal amount, coupon, maturity, and program — for example, "U.S. Dollar 3,000,000,000 4.375% Global Notes due September 28, 2006, issued under the Bank's Global Debt Issuance Facility"), and the signature of the transmitting officer.
Some accessions list the EDGAR complete-submission .txt — the full SGML bundle — in documentFormatFiles[] under a blank sequence. When present, it is referenced by URL in metadata; per-document .txt files are the primary artifacts unpacked to the record folder alongside metadata.json.
metadata.json descriptor with all fields enumerated above.<DOCUMENT> from the EDGAR submission, preserved with its original SGML envelope and plain-text body.<PAGE> markers, monospace tabular layout, the issuer letterhead block, and the officer signature lines.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation[] is present in the descriptor but empty), because BW-3 is unrelated to the Investment Company Act framework.dataFiles[] is empty across the corpus..txt, that attachment is reachable via the bundle URL but is not materialized as a standalone file on disk.The form's structure is essentially stable across the May 1996 to December 2002 window. BW-3 was a fixed-purpose Rule 3 report tied to a specific statutory regime (Section 15(a) of the Bretton Woods Agreements Act and Regulation BW), and the World Bank's filing template — letterhead transmittal letter plus Rule 3 report covering obligation terms, distribution plan, spread table, expense itemization, use of proceeds, and signature — is consistent across the corpus. Variation across records is offering-level: the program under which the notes are issued (Global Debt Issuance Facility versus earlier discrete offerings), the currency and structure of the notes (plain-vanilla USD fixed-rate global notes, multi-currency tranches, structured or zero-coupon variants), and the size and identity of the underwriting syndicate. Filings cease entirely after December 2002, when the SEC's disclosure framework for these World Bank issuances was discontinued.
All BW-3 filings throughout the 1996 to 2002 window were submitted as SGML-wrapped plain-text documents under EDGAR's pre-modernization filing conventions. The format does not evolve through the HTML transition that affected later corporate forms — every record uses the same <DOCUMENT>/<TYPE>/<SEQUENCE>/<FILENAME>/<DESCRIPTION>/<TEXT> envelope and the same monospace <PAGE>-delimited body. The only structured layer added by the dataset itself is the metadata.json descriptor wrapping each record.
metadata.json.accessionNo carries the dashed form; downstream joins should normalize one to the other.id is a 32-character hex content hash and is the appropriate stable key for the record within the dataset; accessionNo is the appropriate key for joining to EDGAR.entities[] block consistently identifies the filer as the IBRD with CIK 51120. SIC 6022 ("State Commercial Banks") is an EDGAR-side classification rather than an economically meaningful descriptor of the World Bank, and fiscalYearEnd 0630 reflects the Bank's June fiscal year..txt document, not in metadata.json. Extraction requires parsing the plain-text body, which is laid out in monospace columns rather than as tagged data..txt in the record folder, they remain reachable via the complete-submission bundle URL in linkToTxt.<PAGE> markers in the document body correspond to original page breaks and are useful for reconstructing pagination, particularly for the spread and expense tables, which are typically laid out one per page with column alignment that depends on monospace rendering.filedAt, sized by the principal amount in the body text, and identified at the program level by references such as "Global Debt Issuance Facility" within the cover letter.Every Form BW-3 in this dataset is filed by a single entity: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the core lending arm of the World Bank Group. The IBRD is a supranational institution established by treaty (the 1944 Articles of Agreement adopted at Bretton Woods), with sovereign member states as shareholders rather than private owners.
Form BW-3 is therefore an issuer-specific form with a population of one. No corporate issuer, investment company, broker-dealer, or other multilateral institution files Form BW-3. Underwriters, dealer-managers, selling-group members, and fiscal agents involved in any IBRD debt offering are described inside each filing as transaction participants, but they have no independent BW-3 filing obligation.
The filing is not made under the Securities Act of 1933 or Exchange Act of 1934 registration regimes. It arises under Rule 3 of Regulation BW, the SEC's special rulebook for IBRD securities, adopted pursuant to Section 15(a) of the Bretton Woods Agreements Act (22 U.S.C. 286k-1).
Section 15(a) authorizes the SEC, after consultation with the National Advisory Council on International Monetary and Financial Policies, to suspend Securities Act and Exchange Act registration for IBRD-issued or IBRD-guaranteed securities and to substitute its own disclosure rules. Regulation BW is that substitute regime. Within it:
Because IBRD debt is exempt from Section 5 registration and the IBRD is not an Exchange Act reporting issuer, Section 11(a) registration-statement liability does not attach to Form BW-3. Antifraud exposure under Section 17 of the Securities Act and Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act remains available.
Form BW-3 is event-driven, not periodic. The trigger is a proposed distribution of a primary obligation — i.e., a planned new issuance of debt securities (notes or bonds) by the IBRD into U.S. capital markets, typically through an underwriting syndicate.
Each filing corresponds to one such offering and discloses, for that specific deal:
There is no materiality threshold and no fixed cadence: any planned IBRD primary distribution into U.S. markets is itself the trigger.
Form BW-3 is filed in advance of, or contemporaneously with, the actual pricing and issuance of the offering — operationally similar in role to a prospectus supplement or pricing disclosure. Filing frequency tracks the IBRD's funding calendar: clusters during active issuance windows, gaps when the IBRD is not tapping U.S. markets. There are no quarterly or annual deadlines.
The dataset covers EDGAR-era Form BW-3 submissions from May 1996 through December 2002. May 1996 reflects the onset of EDGAR capture for Regulation BW filings; any earlier paper-era BW-3 filings are not included. New BW-3 filings ceased after December 2002 as the IBRD's U.S. distribution disclosures migrated to other channels. The dataset is therefore closed, not a live stream.
In short: every record is the IBRD, and only the IBRD, announcing under Regulation BW Rule 3 (authorized by Section 15(a) of the Bretton Woods Agreements Act) the terms of a specific proposed U.S. debt distribution, filed at or near pricing during the May 1996 – December 2002 EDGAR window.
Form BW-3 occupies an unusually narrow corner of EDGAR: a distribution-specific report under Regulation BW, filed only by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) under Section 15(a) of the Bretton Woods Agreements Act rather than the Securities Act of 1933 or the Exchange Act of 1934. The closest comparison set is therefore small: the sister form in the BW family, the Form 18 / 18-K regime for foreign sovereigns, and the 424B prospectus-supplement chain that BW-3 functionally replaces for IBRD.
Form BW-2 (quarterly statement of IBRD). Same filer, same regulation, opposite axis. BW-2 is calendar-driven and portfolio-level: a recurring snapshot of outstanding primary obligations and financial condition. BW-3 is event-driven and transaction-level: the terms, pricing, and underwriting economics of a single debt issuance. BW-2 tells you what is outstanding; BW-3 tells you how each issue came to market. Together they were IBRD's principal continuous-disclosure stream on EDGAR until BW filings ceased at the end of 2002.
424B prospectus supplements (424B1–B5, B7, B8). For corporate debt distributions, a 424B2 or 424B5 pricing supplement plays the same functional role that BW-3 plays for IBRD: maturity, coupon, redemption provisions, underwriting spread, expenses, and use of proceeds for a specific take-down. The differences are structural, not functional:
Form 18 and Form 18-K (foreign sovereigns and political subdivisions). These are the closest analogs in regulatory architecture: a specialized regime for non-corporate, non-domestic issuers outside the standard Securities Act registration path. Differences from BW-3: (1) eligible filers are sovereigns and their political subdivisions, not multilateral institutions; (2) Form 18-K is annual and broad, covering economic and fiscal conditions of the sovereign, while BW-3 is per-distribution and narrow; (3) the 18 / 18-K regime sits under the Securities and Exchange Acts, while BW-3 sits under the Bretton Woods Agreements Act. The sovereign equivalent of an IBRD bond issue is captured through 18-K plus prospectus supplements, not through any single form.
Other multilateral issuer disclosures (IDB, ADB, AfDB). Other supranationals lack a Regulation BW analog and disclose through registration statements and prospectus supplements under their own offering programs. They resemble BW-3 only in that they originate from supranational issuers; their disclosure cadence is annual financial condition plus per-deal supplements, not a dedicated distribution form. BW-3 is the only EDGAR record type that captures itemized, deal-level distribution economics for a supranational issuer under a purpose-built SEC regulation.
Form FX. Filed by foreign governments to designate an agent for service of process. Procedural only, with no financial, distribution, or pricing content. Shares with BW-3 only the cross-border issuer context; otherwise unrelated.
Form S-3 / Form F-3 shelf registrations. These register a maximum aggregate offering amount and are the umbrella under which 424B take-downs occur. BW-3 has no registration-level counterpart because IBRD does not register under the Securities Act. Treat BW-3 as collapsing the S-3/F-3 plus 424B layers into a single distribution-level filing, with no separate shelf record.
Form BW-3 is the only EDGAR record type that originates under the Bretton Woods Agreements Act, is filed by a single multilateral issuer, captures distribution-level economics for individual debt issues, and exists as a self-contained disclosure without an underlying shelf registration. It is closest in cadence and content to a 424B pricing supplement, closest in regulatory architecture to Form 18-K, and closest in filer identity to Form BW-2 — but none of these substitute for it. BW-2 lacks per-deal economics, 424B applies to a different filer universe and assumes Securities Act registration, and 18-K is annual and sovereign-focused. Post-2002 IBRD distribution data must be sourced from the issuer's own publications, as no successor EDGAR form exists.
The Form BW-3 Files Dataset, as a closed archive of supranational debt-distribution filings from May 1996 to December 2002, is used by a small set of specialist roles working with SSA (sovereign, supranational, and agency) issuance terms, distribution economics, and exempted disclosure regimes.
Sell-side and buy-side analysts covering sovereign, supranational, and agency debt mine the obligation descriptions for maturity, coupon, currency, principal, and redemption terms to reconstruct historical term sheets. The spread tables feed peer comparisons of gross spreads, selling concessions, and management fees against current relative-value work.
DCM bankers pitching SSA mandates use the distribution plans and spread tables as historical benchmarks for syndicate structure, concession allocation, and fee proposals to multilateral and sovereign clients.
Attorneys with SSA practices treat the filings as a precedent library when drafting underwriting agreements, redemption mechanics, and distribution plans for current exempted offerings. The corpus also supports memoranda on Section 15(a) of the Bretton Woods Agreements Act and Regulation BW.
Treasury and legal teams at multilateral institutions, export credit agencies, and debt management offices use the corpus as a comparative reference for their own disclosure detail in obligation descriptions, spread tables, and expense itemizations, and to respond to investor or auditor requests for historical issuance data.
Quants and data engineers extract public offering price, underwriting discount, proceeds to issuer, and selling concessions from the spread tables, then combine them with the expense itemizations to compute all-in issuance costs. Output feeds long-horizon models of underwriting-fee compression and term-structure studies for supranational issuers.
Credit teams use obligation descriptions, redemption provisions, and application-of-proceeds language to reconstruct the issuer's 1996-2002 liability profile and funding narrative as a complement to current financial statements.
Finance economists study primary-market pricing, gross spreads, and underwriting-fee dynamics using the spread tables and expense summaries as a clean comparable. Securities-regulation scholars examine how an exempted disclosure regime operated in practice and why filings ceased after 2002.
Researchers documenting post-Bretton Woods institutional finance and the evolution of multilateral disclosure use the application-of-proceeds language, syndicate composition, and redemption mechanics as a self-contained primary source for scholarly articles and archival reference work.
Teams building retrieval systems and domain-specific models for supranational debt or historical securities-regulation research ingest the corpus as a tight, coherent training and retrieval source covering Regulation BW practice and historical underwriting economics.
Compliance officers at multilateral lenders and other statutorily exempted issuers use the finite corpus as a citable benchmark when arguing for or against specific disclosure approaches in obligation descriptions, distribution plans, and expense reporting.
Specialist users cluster around five jobs: pricing and structuring SSA deals, drafting and benchmarking exempted-issuer disclosure, building long-horizon issuance-economics datasets, scholarly research on supranational finance and Regulation BW, and feeding focused financial retrieval systems. Each draws on a different slice of the same record — obligation terms, distribution plan, spread table, expense itemization, redemption provisions, or application of proceeds.
Parse the Rule 3 report body in each .txt document to extract currency, principal amount, coupon, maturity, redemption provisions, and program name (Global Debt Issuance Facility versus earlier discrete offerings) for every accession. Joining on accessionNo and filedAt from metadata.json yields a single offering-level table covering the World Bank's full EDGAR-disclosed primary issuance over the window, usable as the historical baseline for SSA relative-value desks.
Extract the tabular distribution spread — gross proceeds, underwriting discount, dealer concession, reallowance — from the per-page monospace tables in each report, normalize to basis points of principal, and align with filedAt. The resulting series supports long-horizon studies of fee compression on supranational debt and benchmarks current DCM fee proposals against pre-2003 IBRD precedent.
Combine the itemized expense summary (legal, printing, listing, rating-agency, trustee, fiscal-agent fees) with the distribution spread to compute an all-in cost per dollar of proceeds for each offering. The series feeds quant models of supranational issuance economics and provides a citable comparable for treasury teams sizing expense budgets on new SSA mandates.
Read the distribution-plan section of each report to enumerate lead managers, co-managers, and syndicate members. Aggregating across the BW-3 filings produces a longitudinal record of which dealers ran IBRD books and on what terms, supporting historical league tables and pitch material for current SSA syndicate proposals.
Treat the corpus as a closed precedent set when drafting underwriting agreements, redemption mechanics, or distribution-plan language for currently exempted issuers. Counsel can grep across the unpacked .txt documents for specific clauses (call provisions, global-note status, fiscal-agent arrangements) and cite by accessionNo plus linkToFilingDetails for round-trip verification against EDGAR.
Ingest the per-document .txt bodies, strip the SGML envelope and <PAGE> markers, and chunk by section header (header block, obligation description, distribution plan, spread table, expenses, use of proceeds, signature) to build a retrieval index. The id content hash and accessionNo serve as stable citation keys in answers about Regulation BW practice, IBRD program structure, and historical underwriting economics.
Pair the dataset's coverage boundary (May 1996 entry into EDGAR; December 2002 cessation) with the cover-letter regulatory citations (REGULATION BW, RULE 3, FILE NO. 1-3431) to study how a Section 15(a) Bretton Woods Agreements Act disclosure channel operated in practice and why it ended. Useful as a primary-source anchor for securities-regulation scholarship and archival reference on supranational SEC reporting.
The Form BW-3 Files Dataset is small and self-contained, covering filings from May 1996 through December 2002. It can be accessed three ways: through the dataset index JSON API, as a single full-archive download, or by retrieving individual container files. Because the entire dataset is compact, most users can simply download the full archive in one request.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-bw3-files.json
This endpoint returns metadata describing the dataset and the list of available container files. It does not require an API key. The response includes the dataset name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date, total record count and size, covered form types, container format, file types, the full-dataset download URL, and a containers array with per-container size, record count, updated timestamp, and download URL. Polling this endpoint is the recommended way to detect which containers changed in the most recent refresh and to decide which files to download incrementally.
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6a12-85c5-72bd26455af0",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-bw3-files.zip",
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"name": "Form BW-3 Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T18:26:17.652Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "1996-05-01",
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"totalRecords": 96,
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"totalSize": 1538190,
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"formTypes": ["BW-3"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-bw3-files/2002/2002-12.zip",
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"key": "2002/2002-12.zip",
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"size": 18432,
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"records": 2,
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T18:26:17.652Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-bw3-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete dataset as a single ZIP archive containing every Form BW-3 filing in the collection. Given the dataset's small footprint, this is typically the simplest way to obtain the entire corpus in one call. This endpoint requires a valid SEC-API key passed via the token query parameter.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-bw3-files/2002/2002-12.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container from the dataset, useful when only a specific time period is needed or when syncing recently updated containers identified through the index API. Replace the year and month path segment with any container key listed in the index response. This endpoint requires a valid SEC-API key.
The dataset covers Form BW-3, a transactional report filed under Rule 3 of Regulation BW. Regulation BW was promulgated by the SEC under Section 15(a) of the Bretton Woods Agreements Act and governed the disclosure obligations of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development when offering debt securities in the United States.
One record corresponds to a single Form BW-3 submission to EDGAR, identified by its 18-digit accession number and stored as a folder containing a metadata.json descriptor and every primary EDGAR document from that submission except image attachments. Logically, each record is one offering-level disclosure — a single proposed distribution of an IBRD primary obligation — rather than an issuer-period observation.
Only the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the lending arm of the World Bank Group, files Form BW-3. It is an issuer-specific form with a population of one: no corporate issuer, investment company, broker-dealer, or other multilateral institution files BW-3, and underwriters or fiscal agents in IBRD offerings appear inside each filing as transaction participants rather than as independent filers.
The dataset covers EDGAR-era Form BW-3 submissions from May 1996 through December 2002. May 1996 reflects the onset of EDGAR capture for Regulation BW filings, and new BW-3 filings ceased after December 2002, making the dataset a closed corpus rather than a live stream.
The dataset is distributed as ZIP containers organized by year and month (YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip). Inside each container, every accession folder holds a JSON metadata descriptor and one or more TXT files carrying the SGML-wrapped plain-text BW-3 documents from the original EDGAR submission.
Both forms are filed by the IBRD under Regulation BW, but they sit on opposite axes. BW-2 is calendar-driven and portfolio-level — a recurring snapshot of outstanding primary obligations and financial condition — while BW-3 is event-driven and transaction-level, capturing the terms, pricing, and underwriting economics of a single proposed debt issuance.
A 424B supplement plays the same functional role for corporate debt distributions that BW-3 plays for the IBRD, but the legal architecture differs: 424B documents are filed under Securities Act Rule 424 and presuppose an effective S-3 or F-3 shelf registration, while BW-3 is filed under Regulation BW because IBRD obligations are exempt from Securities Act registration. A 424B is one link in a chain anchored to a base prospectus and is open to virtually any registered issuer; a BW-3 is self-contained and restricted to the IBRD.