Coverage and representativeness of Orbis data

Matěj Bajgar, Giuseppe Berlingieri, Sara Calligaris, Chiara Criscuolo and Jonathan Timmis ()
Additional contact information
Sara Calligaris: OECD

No 2020/06, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: This paper describes the coverage and representativeness of Orbis, a commercial database of firm-level records across many countries. Such databases can provide key insights into global economic trends and shed light on how policies affect firms within and across countries. As a benchmark, the paper uses industry-level data from the OECD STAN dataset as well as micro-aggregated data from the OECD MultiProd and DynEmp projects, which draw on official microdata representative of the entire firm population. Results indicate that Orbis is more suitable for studies that: i) take a global perspective rather than make comparisons across countries; ii) analyse top performers and multinationals rather than underperforming firms; and iii) focus on mean performance or changes within firms rather than the entire firm distribution or entry and exit.

Keywords: cross-country analysis; distributed microdata analysis; firm-level data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 O47 Y1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/c7bdaa03-en (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:stiaaa:2020/06-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().