Firms’ Financial Statements and Competitiveness: An Analysis for European Non-Financial Corporations Using Micro-Based Data

20 Pages Posted: 4 Aug 2015

See all articles by Nicola Benatti

Nicola Benatti

European Central Bank (ECB)

Annalisa Ferrando

European Central Bank (ECB)

Pierre Lamarche

European Union - Eurostat

Date Written: August 3, 2015

Abstract

In the empirical analysis the use of micro-data often encounters confidentiality issues, especially when data are derived from different countries. One way to tackle this type of problems is known as “distributed micro-data analysis”, which proposes an aggregation of data with sufficient information on the distribution of the underlying micro-based data. In this paper we propose an inverse analysis, i.e. a methodology to mimic the anonymised firms’ micro-data starting from a distributed micro-dataset and using standard equations and assumptions about the distribution of the residuals that are most likely to reproduce the original micro dataset. As a result this paper offers an easy tool to analyse the firm-level financial ratios, such as firms’ leverage, profitability, and productivity performance of firms across country, sector and firm size even when firm-level data are not readily available.

Keywords: firm-level data, distributed micro-data analysis, simulation-based inference

JEL Classification: D22, D24, C53

Suggested Citation

Benatti, Nicola and Ferrando, Annalisa and Lamarche, Pierre, Firms’ Financial Statements and Competitiveness: An Analysis for European Non-Financial Corporations Using Micro-Based Data (August 3, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2639171 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2639171

Nicola Benatti (Contact Author)

European Central Bank (ECB) ( email )

Sonnemannstrasse 22
Frankfurt am Main, 60314
Germany

Annalisa Ferrando

European Central Bank (ECB) ( email )

Sonnemannstrasse 22
Frankfurt am Main, 60314
Germany

Pierre Lamarche

European Union - Eurostat ( email )

Luxembourg, L-2920
Luxembourg

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