A Comparison of Qualitative and Quantitative Firm Performance Measures

Richard Fabling, Arthur Grimes and Philip Stevens

No 292661, Motu Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Abstract: Many analyses of firm performance are based upon self-reported measures. However, not only are these likely to be more subject to general reporting error than alternative official sources, but also measures of relative performance may be subject to the biases observed in the psychology literature. In this paper we consider both absolute and relative performance, reported in the Business Operations Survey (BOS), with alternative measures taken from administrative sources, brought together under the Improved Business Understanding via Longitudinal Database Development (IBULDD) project in the prototype Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). Our results suggest that there is much commonality in the picture we see using either administrative (tax) or quantitative survey data, giving us some comfort that the tax data, while not collected for statistical purposes, serves as well as a tool for measuring firm performance. However, there are many differences also, in particular when we consider reported profits.

Keywords: Research; Methods/Statistical; Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70
Date: 2008-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/292661/files/A ... ormance-Measures.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:motuwp:292661

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.292661

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Motu Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().