Dear fellow NBER researcher,
This email is sent in case you have some interest in
accessing ORBIS historical data via the NBER-Bureau van Dijk license. If
you are not interested in this data, you can stop reading.
Last November, NBER renewed its one-year license agreement with Moody's
Analytics-Bureau van Dijk to provide access to the ORBIS historical product
data. This licensing agreement was organized as a consortium model: each
research team signed up and contributed the funds to the NBER, which acts
as a passthrough (for the license) and as a host for the data.
The time for renewal is upon us.
This message describes the data that is available, and the commitments that
we will need from research teams interested in working with these data if
we decide to renew for another year.
Detailed information on the ORBIS data are available at:
https://data.nber.org/data/orbis/.
For those of you who have worked with ORBIS products, it is important to
note that there are several important differences between the historical
product and the web product. The historical product combines historical
vintages into one final product over time, taking care of several issues
detailed in the documentation above. This provides a longitudinal data set
for firms across countries over time starting in 2005.
If enough NBER researchers agree to sign-up, we will be able to cover the
licensing cost and renew the license for another year. The terms of the
agreement will include the following provisions:
1. The license will grant access to ORBIS historical product to up to
25 NBER-affiliated individual researchers and their research assistants.
2. The data will be hosted on NBER servers and available to
the NBER researchers who have contributed to funding the license.
3. Individual NBER researchers can write papers using the ORBIS historical
product data with co-authors outside the NBER, or with NBER co-authors who
are not subscribers to the license, but only the
individual NBER researchers who have contributed to the license costs, and
their research assistants, will be able to access the data.
4. The license will be for one calendar year. It is renewable, but even if
it is not, access to the data will be guaranteed until the research project
is published, or for up to five years, whichever comes sooner, for any
research project started before the expiration of the original license,
until publication. If everything goes according to plan, we expect the new
license to start around *January 2022*.
5. The price of the license for one individual researcher is
*$10,000*. NBER will
charge researchers this fee, or debit it from their research grant funds,
as appropriate. While this is a substantial fee, the institutional price
for this data set is over $400,000, which makes it beyond the reach of most
individual researchers and many universities. The consortium model we
have used for the past two years makes the data available at a fraction of
that price.
6. If more than 25 researchers are interested in this data, we will apply a
"first-come first-serve rule". If you know you want this data, we encourage
you to express your firm interest early! We may be able to negotiate access
for more than 25 researchers, but this is not guaranteed.
7. If fewer than 25 researchers express interest in the data, the
consortium may not be able to cover the cost of the license, so it is
unlikely that the arrangement will be renewed.
If you would like to use the data and can make a firm financial commitment
now, please fill in the following survey no later than September 20, 2021:
https://tinyurl.com/m94hv2f4.
If you make a commitment, and we receive sufficient interest to proceed,
you will receive an invoice (or a charge to your grant) from NBER.
If you have any questions about the data or the license plan, please reach
out to one of us:
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, pog_at_berkeley.edu
Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, kalemli_at_econ.umd.edu
--
*Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas* | UC Berkeley | Faculty Director, Clausen
Center |
Professor of economics | email: pog_at_berkeley.edu | web:
https://sites.google.com/view/pgourinchas |
Received on Fri Sep 10 2021 - 15:23:45 EDT
