What?

The purpose of FIRMBACKBONE is to build an organically growing, longitudinal data-infrastructure with information on Dutch companies for scientific research.

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 and students 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 are that such data are too expensive to obtain or not user-friendly.

How?

A “backbone” is created that contains all Dutch companies based on the Dutch Chamber of Commerce register (KVK Handelsregister). This is combined with financial information from annual reports from companies. We have enriched the data with additional employment information and web-scraped data of company websites. Organic growth means that more data sources are yet to come!

The FIRMBACKBONE infrastructure is ready, and the data are accessible through an access protocol and accessible through SANE (Secure ANalysis Environment) hosted at SURF. Collaboration with ODISSEI and SURF ensures adequate data protection, governance, and long-term sustainability.

Which data?

The meta-data for all FIRMBACKBONE data can be found in the ODISSEI data portal.

Currently data comprises:

• KVK handelsregister Dec. 2023
• KVK handelsregister Feb. 2024
• KVK handelsregister Feb. 2025 (forthcoming)
• LISA 2019-2022
• Webscrape company websites May 2024
• Webscrape company websites Feb. 2025 (forthcoming)

For whom?

Potential users are researchers – and students in the near future – interested in the analysis of information of companies in general. The requirement is that the researcher is affiliated with Dutch universities and who’s faculty is an ODISSEI consortium-member.

Users can be found across all sub-disciplines of business—from marketing, strategy and entrepreneurship to accounting and finance—and also include economic geographers, historians, labor sociologists, and so on.

Researchers making use of FIRMBACKBONE are invited to enrich it with other data that they have collected (e.g., through surveys or tailor-made indicators). Publications of scientific results are requested to refer to FIRMBACKBONE and the DOI / DOI’s related to the specific dataset that is/are used.