Economics

Build Datasets

Passport Global Market Information Database
Access: UCI - Authorized Affiliates
Geography: Global 
Statistical data on numerous B2C markets:  Alcoholic Drinks, Apparel and Footwear, Automotive, Beauty and Personal Care, Consumer Appliances, Consumer Electronics, Consumer Health, Eyewear, Fresh Food, Health and Wellness, Home and Garden, Home Care, Hot Drinks, Luxury Goods, Packaged Food, Personal Accessories, Pet Care, Soft Drinks, Tissue and Hygiene, Tobacco, and Toys and Games.

• Learn this search!  < Get coffee market sizes over time for countries worldwide. (Please refresh if the content doesn't load after a few seconds)

IBISWorld
Access: UCI
Geography: US
Current and historic Industry Reports and Risk Rating reports on 700+ well-established U.S. industries (organized by NAICS code), including operating conditions, outlook, trends, and key players.  Also has current and historic Specialized Industry Reports reports for small niche industries.  Especially useful if you want to build a dataset with categorical variables!

• Learn this search!  < Filter and compare US industries. (Please refresh if the content doesn't load after a few seconds)

SimplyAnalytics
Access: UCI
Geography: US
Maximum 3 users at once! An easy-to-use interface offering thousands of social and economic data variables that can be used when building custom maps and reports (i.e. spreadsheets).  Register for a free account to save and return to your work. 

• Learn this search!  < Get consumer group data by region. (Please refresh if the content doesn't load after a few seconds)

S&P Capital IQ
Access: UCI - Authorized Affiliates
Geography: Global
A comprehensive company intelligence database, offering granular financial and capital structure information on millions of companies worldwide, including data and graphs for historic stock prices, searchable SEC filings, mergers & acquisitions activities, and venture capital/private equity data.  

• Create custom tables of data; content is downloadable as Excel files.   

FitchConnect
Access: UCI - Authorized Affiliates
Geography: Global
 A global intelligence database, featuring analysis, and expert commentary on 20+ industries and more than 200 countries and territories that collectively account for 99% of world GDP

• From the top navigation bar, go to BMI > Data Tools.  A Bulk Export option is available.  

Vivvix 
Access: UCI
Geography: US
Advertising expenditures and occurrence information for millions of brands across a variety of national-level media, with data going back 5 years.  Part of the Kantar Media portfolio.  

Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS)
Access: UCI - Authorized Affiliates
Geography: Global
Typically for PhD and faculty-level research.  Important databases in: finance, accounting, banking, economics, management, marketing and public policy. Merage users login through Catalyst.

Time Series Data Files

CI Technology Historical Data
Access: UCI - Authorized Affiliates
Geography: US
Formerly produced by Harte Hanks.  Data on the installed technology and purchase plans of businesses, governments and institutions at the local level, spanning 1992-2022.  The UCI Libraries' access to this dataset ends on Wednesday September 22nd, 2027.  

Corporate Affiliations Historical Data
Access: UCI - Authorized Affiliates
Geography: Global (limited)
Historical hierarchies and profiles of over 1.9 million of the most prominent parent companies, subsidiaries, affiliates and divisions worldwide.  

Nielsen Datasets  
Access: UCI - Limited Affiliates
Geography: US
For PhD students and Tenure Track Faculty only!  The UCI Libraries' subscription includes the Consumer Panel dataset and the Retail Scanner dataset.  Data is from a partnership between Nielsen and the Kilts Center for Marketing at the Chicago Booth School of Business.

RateWatch Scholar Historical Data
Access: UCI - Authorized Affiliates
Geography: US
Information for U.S. financial institutions for research and analysis.  Data covers over 96,000 branch locations, depending on time period and data type, all provided voluntarily.  Data is gathered from institutions of all types and sizes, including banks, credit unions, savings and loan associations, etc. 

ReferenceUSA Historical Data
Access: UCI - Authorized Affiliates
Geography: US
Datasets consisting of annual snapshots of historic company data from Infogroup's U.S. Business Database. Includes company name, mailing address, SIC and NAICS codes, employee size, sales volume, and location (to zip code). 

More Data
 

UCI Machine Learning Repository
A collection of databases, domain theories, and data generators that are used by the machine learning community for the empirical analysis of machine learning algorithms. It is used by students, educators, and researchers all over the world as a primary source of machine learning data sets. 

IPUMS
Census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community context.  From the University of Minnesota.  (IPUMS was an acronym for Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, but in 2016 it became a standalone name, not an acronym).  

re3data.org
The Registry of Research Data Repositories.  Identifies and lists 1,500+ research data repositories, making it the largest and most comprehensive registry of data repositories available on the web.

Academic Torrents
A community-maintained distributed repository for datasets and scientific knowledge.  The service is designed to facilitate storage of all the data used in research, including datasets as well as publications.

SNAP
The SNAP library is being actively developed since 2004 and is organically growing as a result of Stanford University's research pursuits in analysis of large social and information networks.

Billion Prices Project
An academic initiative that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct research in macro and international economics.

DocNow
Documenting the Now, a collaborative effort among multiple universities, is building a variety of tools to help researchers work with Twitter data.  Twitter's terms of service don't allow tweet datasets to be published on the web, but they do allow tweet identifier datasets to be shared.   DocNow maintains a catalog of Twitter datasets that are publicly available on the web.

California Policy Lab
A non-partisan research institute based at the University of California. Work is focused in six policy areas: education, criminal justice reform, poverty and the social safety net, labor and employment, health, and homelessness and high needs populations.  Offers and streamlines access to data for policy-related research.  (Note: some data may include fees or an approval process prior to use.)

What's the difference between a database and a dataset? 

• A database refers to a collection of information and/or data, usually covering a broad theme (e.g., industries, psychology, etc.).  Info/data can exist in any medium- text, images, spreadsheets, video, etc.  The info/data in a database may come from one producer (e.g. Mintel produces its own market research reports), or it may come from several producers (e.g. Factiva compiles news articles from thousands of different publications worldwide). 


• A dataset refers to a narrower collection of information and/or data, usually describing a specific topic or phenomenon (e.g., the stock price of a company, or consumers' responses to surveys, etc.).  In business and economics, as academic disciplines, datasets are often presented as spreadsheets in filetypes such as .xlsx or .csv.
   
• An online database often contains individual datasets.  Our databases are resources that either 1) contain pre-made datasets, 2) or help you create custom datasets by requesting specific data (i.e. running a query) within the database.

How can I get a file of data?

• Get Pre-built Datasets: This tab lists resources with pre-made files (e.g. Excel sheets) to download.
   
  • PRO: It's relatively more easy to get a data file.  
     
  • CON: The data file might not be customized to your research interests.  
     
• Build Datasets: This tab lists resources that let you customize what's in the Excel file before you download it.  This is generally a more challenging way to get a data file!
   
  • PRO: The data file might be customized to your research interests.  
     
  • CON: It's relatively more challenging to get a data file.  

What terms should I know when I talk about 'data'?

• Data
  "Related items of (chiefly numerical) information considered collectively, typically obtained by scientific work and used for reference, analysis, or calculation." (OED Online)
  
  
• Raw Data
  This term is fuzzy because almost any observable or recorded phenomena could theoretically be raw data, but people often use it when referring to a dataset in a file format (e.g. .xlsx, .csv, .sav) that's often presented as a spreadsheet. 
  • Caveat: raw data is not always cleaned data.  
     
• Cleaned Data
  To clean data, people or computer programs assess data, organize it, and correct errors, omissions, duplicates, inaccuracies, etc., thereby making the data ready for analysis.  Determining whether data is clean enough for your needs can be tricky.  Read the supporting documentation that accompanies a dataset, and contact the data producer or custodian if you have questions.  
   
• Time Series Data
  This refers to the same data variable(s) being gathered over standard periods of time (e.g. weeks, quarters, years, etc.).  
   
• Statistics
  This generally refers to data that was processed and analyzed.  For example, if you have sales data from several car dealerships, then you could analyze that data to generate statistics about consumers' vehicle preferences.