Dear NBER affiliates,
Nielsen and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) have entered
into an agreement to make Nielsen’s media-related data available for
academic research. On the NBER side, the initiative is led by Andrew
Sweeting (University of Maryland and NBER), Matthew Gentzkow (Stanford
University and NBER) and Jesse Shapiro (Brown University and NBER). This
initiative has received generous financial support from the Sloan
Foundation, and the NBER hopes that this agreement may become a model
for how proprietary datasets can be made available to academic
researchers.
Under the agreement, the NBER will solicit and select research proposals
that will make use of Nielsen's data on media. The amount of data that
can be supplied will depend on the number of Nielsen analyst hours
required to extract the data. The Sloan Foundation's funding will
support data extraction costs in the first year of this initiative. The
data can only be used for academic research, and both working and
published papers will be subject to review by Nielsen to make sure that
commercially-sensitive data are not disclosed and that their data is
being described appropriately. The supplied data will be stored and used
on the NBER's computing infrastructure.
The Nielsen data available cover the media usage and advertising that
Nielsen monitors and the consumer surveys that it conducts in the United
States. Examples of the types of data available include:
- Nielsen's basic TV ratings data (e.g., network, program, daypart,
episode ratings, by age, gender and DMA), from 1991 to the present
- Nielsen's advanced TV ratings data, which include minute-by-minute
ratings data for programs and commercials; these ratings can be broken
down by both demographics and other household information, such as
whether the household subscribes to services such as Hulu or Netflix,
and they can be combined to look at the extent to which households watch
combinations of programming. Much of this data will be available back to
2002
- topline data on website traffic back to 2011, with data available by
demographic group for the last 24 months
- data on browsing and app usage on mobile devices (smartphones and
tablets)
- national and local radio ratings, together with information on
station formats, back to 2010 (this data would be similar to Arbitron
data from earlier years)
- Nielsen's Advertising Intelligence data, tracking brand-level
advertising across 22 media types, including dollar expenditures and
estimates of exposures, back to 1993
- information from a range of Nielsen's syndicated surveys, including
Scarborough that track consumer behavior. Requests for adding additional
questions to these surveys will also be considered.
For more information on the available data and the proposal process
please visit
http://nber.org/callforpapers/CallforProposalsNBER-NielsenMediaProjects.html
Please contact Andrew Sweeting at sweeting_at_econ.umd.edu or Alterra
Milone at alterra_at_nber.org with any questions.
Thank you,
Alterra Milone
Director, Research and Grants Management
Corporate Secretary
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Telephone: 617-588-0306
Fax: 617-868-7194
E-mail: alterra_at_nber.org
http://www.nber.org/
Received on Fri May 19 2017 - 14:52:03 EDT
