Data quality in Orbis

Javier Garcia-Bernardo

CORPNET Symposium on Economic Power, Jan 8th, 2018

@javiergb_com / @UvACORPNET

What's in Orbis

Data on companies:

~250 million companies.

~100 million companies with financial information.

Data connecting companies:

- Contacts

* Positions (223, 118 imp)

* Information on people (121 mi)

What's in Orbis

Data connecting companies:

- Ownership (~100 million)

What's in Orbis

- Ownership database

- Listed companies

- Orbis has more information on individuals owning shares.

Comparison with Thomson One

Missing data in Orbis

Missing fields

Missing nodes

Employment    Turnover    Sector         ID

Missing fields

Missing nodes

Missing nodes

Missing nodes

ORBIS data (200 million companies)

Observed average revenue

How to know where

your data stands?

Exploration: Comparison with external sources

Explanation: Model the data

0-9               10-19            20-49          50-249         GE250

Exploration

Interactive visualizations

Code: https://github.com/uvacorpnet/interactive_visualizations

Exploration

Our data is biased toward big companies

• Higher GDP/capita ➙ Larger average companies
• Higher GDP/capita ➙  Higher quality
• Higher quality ➙  Smaller observed average  (since we have the small ones)

Exploration

AVERAGE IN THE DATABASE

ESTIMATED AVERAGE 

Explanation

Company revenue

• Information on low and middle income countries is terrible.
• Information on the US is not great (compared with other Western countries).

• In general there are always problems of comparability between countries.
  • Different requirements or standards
    • Positions / Sectors / Financials
  • Capability to collect information

Drawbacks

Advantages

• The most complete database.
• Richer information on small and middle size companies.
• Okay(ish) information on real owners.
• Unique ID over many databases and efforts to deduplicate.

• Regarding comparability:
  • The information on large companies (>10 M revenue) is good for all countries.
  • For OECD countries you can compare it with aggregated statistics.