FIRMBACKBONE

FIRMBACKBONE is an organically growing longitudinal data-infrastructure with information on Dutch companies for academic research. Once it is ready, it will become available for researchers affiliated with universities in the Netherlands through ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations. FIRMBACKBONE is an initiative of and collaboration between Utrecht University and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Why? The digitalization of our society and economy has enabled novel methods of data collection and analysis of companies. Such digital data are both deep (i.e., detailed) and long (i.e., over time) in scope and harbor much potential for creating new economic insights and applications. However, academic researchers in (applied) economics and adjacent fields (e.g., management, entrepreneurship, economic geography and history) currently lack access to a comprehensive and longitudinal data source on Dutch companies. Often-heard complaints from researchers are that such data are too expensive to obtain or not user-friendly. How? A “backbone” will be created that contains a list of company names and company numbers that are publicly accessible. We will enrich the data with additional public information (e.g., through web scraping of company websites) and by collaborating with local data suppliers.