ORBIS at NBER

Orbis at NBER

This page documents /home/data/orbis. A later version of this data is documented at /home/data/orbis2". We will not be removing obsolete files in the interest of reproducibility, however this file is presumably obsoleted by the newer data The NBER collection of ORBIS data is available to NBER affiliated faculty who are members of the ORBIS group. For information contact Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan.

The data has been processed in several stages, all the intermediate stages are available but should not be required by users. If you do find you need one of the earlier stages, please consult with us first.

Stage 1 - /home/data/bvd/{financial|detail|ownership|global}/*rar .rar files as downloaded from the BvD ftp site. ftp site.
Stage 2 - /home/data/bvd/*/txt .txt files expanded from Stage 1. Multipart stage 1 files are assembled into a single file.
Stage 3 - /home/data/bvd/world/*.dta files imported from stage 2.
Stage 4 - /home/data/bvd/bycnty/CC/* .dta files separated by country. At this point no information has been lost or improved.
Stage 5 - /home/data/orbis/bycnty/CC/* Working .dta files. A number of long string variables are dropped, as are all the "interim" files and financial files in Eurodollars. New files are added which merge industry class information to the financial files. The ownership files are supplimented with entity data. These new files are indicated by an "x" prefix.

Stage 6 - /home/data/orbis/bycnty/CC/*-panel.dta hindfgr.dta and hindgfrusd.dta are reduced by the elimination of duplicate and redundant records.

If you need other formats or have questions about the conversion process, including concerns that information may have been lost, please contact Daniel Feenberg.

Because these files are still quite large, we remind you that the Stata -use- statement can filter by variable and observation. So it isn't necessary to store any variables or observations you won't be using in your analysis.

You may notice that many of the Orbis variables are long strings with few possible values, such as the name of a stock exchange (given 71 bytes) The Stata -encode- command can reduce those to 1 or 2 bytes quite easily.

Agreement forms

Documentation from BvD

Local and other documentation

Notes:

Data cover roughly 2005 through June 2019.
Countries are referred to by 2 letter ISO country code.
Paths are relative to /home/data/orbis/ on the NBER Linux cluster.
Files with all countries are in ./world
Files divided by country are in ./bycnty/CC/
Stata .do files used in the conversion to .dta are in ./code
Stata .dta files with variable information are in ./docs
Stata .log files from the conversion are in ./logs
Variable and file names are all lowercase. Country directory names are uppercase.
Most variable names are created by Stata from variable descriptions. BvD did not provide any variable names to go with the descriptions.
BvD did not provide any additional documentation.
A single copy of all the files in .dta format totals 2.3TB, but compresses to 254GB in our ZFS file store. Nevertheless, Stata decompresses the data in core. The largest single countries are Russia and the US, with 28GB and 20GB of compressed and ten times that amount in core.

Descriptive Data

Notes:

Most of these files had many stray double quote marks. Stata was instructed to ignore them.

File Description	Filename	Comment
Additional company info	addinfo.dta
All addresses	addresses.dta	utf-8 BOM, in process
Auditor current	auditor.dta
Bankers current	bankers.dta	stray quotes
Bankers previous	bankpre.dta	stray quotes
Bvd9	bvd9.dta
BvD ID and Name	bvdname.dta	stray quotes
Contact infor	contact.dta	stray quotes, in process
DMC current only	dmccurr.dta	stray quotes, very long lines (>100K)
DMC previous	dmcprev.dta	stray quotes, very long lines (>100K)
Identifiers	identifiers.dta	BOM
Industry classifications	indclass.dta
Legal info	legal.dta	stray quotes
Other_advisors	advisors.dta
Overviews	overviews.dta	stray quotes utf-8 BOM
StatusHistory	status.dta
Stock exchanges and indexes	exchanges.dta	utf-8 BOM
Trade description	trade.dta
Industry Class Core	indclass_core.dta	Core industry Class

Financials - Detailed cash flow and interim June text

Notes:

The option "x" preceeded the file name indicates a file with industry class information merged and drops records with no industry class information

File Description	Filename	Comment
Cash_flow_non_US-industries	{x}cfnus.dta
Cash_flow_non_US-industries-USD	{x}cfnusindusd.dta
Cash_flow_US-industries	{x}cfusind.dta
Cash_flow_US-industries-USD	{x}cfusindusd.dta
Detailed_format-industries	{x}dfind.dta
Detailed_format-industries-USD	{x}dfindusd.dta

Financials - Gobal format incl histo for industries June text

Notes:

Where the file description was the same as a file in the Detailed group, an "h" was prefixed to the name.
The original files are in ./global/rar and ./global/txt

File Description	Filename	Comment
Banks Global financials and ratios	{x}hbnkgfr.dta
Banks Global financials and ratios USD	{x}hbnkgfrusd.dta
Industry Global Financials and ratios	{x}hindgfr.dta
Industry Global Financials and ratios USD	{x}hindgfrusd.dta
Industry Global Financials and ratios	{x}hindgfr-panel.dta
Industry Global Financials and ratios USD	{x}hindgfrusd-panel.dta
Insurances Global Financials and ratios	{x}hinsgfr.dta
Insurances Global Financials and ratios USD	{x}hinsgfrusd.dta
Key financials	{x}keyfin.dta
Key financials USD	{x}keyfinusd.dta

Ownership Histo June text

Notes:

Each ownership link is kept twice - once in the Ownership (Shareholder) Links file and once in the Subsidiary Links file according to the country code of the owner or subsidiary.
The optional preceeding "x" indicates a file with firm type information merged in from the entities file.

File Description	Filename	Comment
Entities	entities.dta
{x}links_20NN	{x}ownlinksNN.dta	NN runs from 07 to 19.
{x}links_20NN	{x}sublinksNN.dta

Last update 2 December 2019 by drf