Economics—Firms and Industries
Business-related microdata—data such as the net profits or the balance sheets of individual businesses—is one of the most difficult types of data to access for free. The data is voluminous—there are millions of businesses in the United States alone—and, unlike much data, business data is commercially valuable; stock traders, financial analysts, and others are willing to pay a great deal of money for data that can help them improve their earnings or beat their competitors. Aggregate data about industries, on the other hand, is much easier to access. The sources in this chapter cover both microdata on individual firms, where available, and aggregate data covering entire industries.
Major Sources: United States
EDGAR (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
For data on specific companies, EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval, www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/webusers.htm) is the best free source for data on publicly traded companies in the United States. All such companies are required to file periodic reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. federal agency that operates EDGAR. These reports contain legally mandated disclosures on many topics, such as revenues, cash flows, profits or losses, and executive compensation. EDGAR is relatively easy to navigate if one is looking for data on only a few companies and knows the legal names or ticker symbols of the companies of interest. However, its options for finding companies based on criteria other than name (e.g., based on net revenues or other financial characteristics) are limited; only geography and Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code are supported for this type of search.
Census Bureau (U.S. Department of Commerce)
On industries in general, the U.S. Census Bureau manages several surveys, some listed below, that provide detailed data on specific industries in the United States. The aggregate data from these surveys is released based on NAICS codes, a system for organizing businesses into sectors and industries that is explained in chapter 1; it may be helpful to read that explanation before attempting to access data from these sources.
Economic Census (information about the Economic Census, www.census.gov/econ/census/; access to the data, http://factfinder2.census.gov). This census contacts every “employer establishment” in the United States every five years, in the years ending in “2” or “7.” An “establishment” is a single location of a business, so, for example, each individual restaurant in a chain is a separate establishment. Since the Economic Census covers only employer establishments, establishments with no employees (e.g., a plumber or caterer who runs her own business and has no assistants, or a single freelance writer) are not included.1 The specific questions asked vary by industry, but generally each business is asked to provide detailed information about the specific type of work it carries out (e.g., if the business is part of the book publishing industry, is it a university press, an atlas or map publisher, a sheet music publisher) as well as its revenues, expenses, inventories, payroll, and number of employees.
Annual Services Report (www.census.gov/services/index.html), Annual Retail Trade Report (www.census.gov/retail/), and Annual Wholesale Trade Report (www.census.gov/wholesale/). All of these reports provide survey data on sales or revenues, inventories, and expenses for specific industries (down to six-digit NAICS codes). Some data is also available monthly (for retail and wholesale trade) or quarterly (for services).
Annual Survey of Manufactures (www.census.gov/manufacturing/asm). This survey provides more detailed information than the three aforementioned annual sector surveys. For each of hundreds of industries, from the broad (e.g., “apparel manufacturing”) to the narrow (e.g., “guided missile and space vehicle propulsion unit and propulsion unit parts manufacturing”), it provides approximately seventy variables related to payroll and other labor costs, capital expenditures, other expenses, revenues, value of items shipped, and inventories. This data is available in American FactFinder (see chapter 2), 2002 to present.
County Business Patterns and ZIP Code Business Patterns (www.census.gov/econ/cbp/). These programs provide information about the number of establishments, number of employees, and payroll by industry for small geographic areas. Data is also available aggregated for larger geographic areas, such as metropolitan statistical areas and states. The total number of establishments in each industry (down to six-digit NAICS codes) is reported for all geographies, as is the number of establishments in each of nine size categories based on the number of employees. Payroll data and the specific number of employees are reported at the county level and higher, but only if releasing that data does not threaten to reveal the number of employees or payroll information for a specific establishment (see chapter 1 for an explanation of why data is sometimes suppressed to protect the confidentiality of specific individuals or establishments.)
Survey of Business Owners (SBO, www.census.gov/econ/sbo/). Aggregate data from this survey is available in American FactFinder (see chapter 2), but, unlike most of the Census Bureau’s economic surveys, the SBO also makes microdata freely available to the public on its website (www.census.gov/econ/sbo/pums.html). It is also one of the few Census Bureau economic surveys that includes the self-employed, although it excludes farmers and a few other small industries. The SBO is particularly useful for data about businesses owned by women, racial or ethnic minorities, and military veterans, but it can also be used for data on topics such as the amount of startup capital small businesses require, reasons small businesses close, and characteristics of family-owned firms.
All of these sources provide data at the national level; many also provide state and local data. In some instances, including the Economic Census and ZIP Code Business Patterns, data is available for areas as small as ZIP codes.
These are only a few of the many economic surveys managed by the Census Bureau. The following web pages contain tables listing all of the surveys with data on a given sector as well as information about what topics are covered and what level of geographic detail is available:
• Manufacturing (www.census.gov/econ/manufacturing.html)
• Retail (www.census.gov/econ/retail.html)
• Wholesale (www.census.gov/econ/wholesale.html)
• Service Industries (www.census.gov/econ/services.html)
• Construction (www.census.gov/econ/construction.html)
Microdata for firms is one of the few areas of data reference where the freely available resources are often completely inadequate. This is especially true for users who need long historical time series, which are not available from the sources listed below. The ALA Guide to Economics and Business Reference (American Library Association, 2011) provides an overview of the subscription sources that provide access to this data. For libraries that do not have access to these subscription databases, the sources listed below provide short time series for some of the most commonly requested data on individual publicly traded firms.
Yahoo! Finance
Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com) is one useful free source for information about individual firms, especially their historical stock prices and trading volumes. Twenty years or more of stock information is freely available, in CSV format or in interactive graphs, for many stocks both domestic and international. Additional data, such as income and cash flow, is also available, but only for recent time periods. The site also provides direct links to American companies’ Securities and Exchange Commission filings, but beware: these links go to EDGAR Online (www.edgar-online.com), a private subscription service, not the free EDGAR system run by the SEC (discussed above).
Financial Times
The website of the Financial Times newspaper (http://markets.ft.com) offers information similar to that at Yahoo, but with different time ranges. The Financial Times has much shorter time series for stock prices, but it provides additional years of financial data (income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow). Yahoo typically gives three years of such data for all companies; the Financial Times gives five years if users complete a free registration (unregistered users can view only three years). Additionally, the Financial Times site offers a sophisticated “stock screener” tool that allows users to identify all stocks meeting specified criteria, including country or region, sector or industry, market capitalization, and price to earnings ratio. More than 39,000 companies’ stocks are included in the database.
Structural Analysis Database (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)
At the industry level, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishes detailed data as part of its Structural Analysis Database (STAN, www.oecd.org/industry/ind/stanstructuralanalysisdatabase.htm), which is available through its StatExtracts system (http://stats.oecd.org). The OECD uses the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC), a United Nations–sponsored system which, similar to NAICS in North America, organizes businesses into sectors and industries. ISIC is not, however, as specific as NAICS; to take one example, whereas NAICS subdivides its “Construction of Buildings” categories into several smaller categories, covering new single-family housing construction, new multifamily housing construction, industrial building construction, and more, ISIC lumps all of these activities together in an undivided category for “Construction of Buildings.” Data available through STAN includes measures of production, value added, intermediate inputs, operating surplus, number of employees, hours worked, labor cost, exports and imports, and capital stock, formation, and consumption. Unfortunately, data is available for only fifteen of the thirty-four members of the OECD: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, and the United States.
National Statistical Agencies
For some OECD members whose data is not reported in STAN, the data is available from the country’s own statistical bureau. Examples include Japan, where the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry disseminates spreadsheets and PDFs with sector-level data from its statistical website (www.meti.go.jp/english/statistics/); the United Kingdom, where detailed data is available from the UK National Statistics Publication Hub (www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/business-energy/index.html); Australia, where the Australian Bureau of Statistics provides data by industry group and subgroup (www.abs.gov.au, “Topics @ a Glance” tab); and New Zealand, where similarly organized data is published by Statistics New Zealand (www.stats.govt.nz, “Browse for stats” tab). Industry-level or sector-level data is also available in English from some developing countries, including Brazil (www.ibge.gov.br/english/), India (http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/site/home.aspx), and China (www.stats.gov.cn/english/statisticaldata/; note that some parts of this site work only in Internet Explorer).
Minor Sources
Internal Revenue Service
In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service uses its administrative records to compile certain sector-level statistics at the level of firms, which provide a slightly different perspective from the data released by the Census Bureau for establishments. These include data such as the number of businesses filing tax returns, receipts, net income, various types of expenses and other deductions, deficit, assets, and liabilities by the sector, industry, and organizational form of the business (corporation, sole proprietorship, etc.). This data is published as part of the Statistics of Income program (www.irs.gov/uac/Tax-Stats-2), which also publishes statistics on the income of individuals.
Not-for-Profit Sector
Although not-for-profit establishments are included in the Census Bureau’s economic data, they generally are not broken out as a separate category. For example, the data on not-for-profit hospitals and for-profit hospitals is usually all reported together under the industry “General medical and surgical hospitals.” There are, however, a few exceptions: the Annual Services Report (discussed above), for example, separates the revenue data for many industries into establishments that are exempt from federal income tax (i.e., not-for-profit organizations) and establishments that are subject to federal income tax (i.e., for-profit businesses). The IRS, in Statistics of Income, also publishes separate tables of data for tax-exempt organizations (link from www.irs.gov/uac/Tax-Stats-2).
There are freely accessible private sources with detailed information about individual not-for-profit organizations. Two of the most useful are Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) and the Foundation Center (http://foundationcenter.org), both of which provide access to the Form 990s filed with the IRS by not-for-profit organizations. These forms include annual data about each not-for-profit’s finances, including amount and sources of its revenue, expenses in various categories, assets and liabilities, total amount spent on salaries, and individual salaries of certain high-level or highly paid persons. Unfortunately, the data is available only as PDF copies of the forms, so the data must be copied out to a spreadsheet before it can be analyzed. Individual charities may also make copies of their Form 990s, or other financial information, available on their own websites for more years than are available through these sources.
Note
1. Data about nonemployer establishments is available in Nonemployer Statistics (www.census.gov/econ/nonemployer/), and nonemployer establishments are also included in the Survey of Business Owners.