1st Data User Conference

The conference is jointly organized by the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet), France Stratégie and the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).

The questions of modern day economics warrant different approaches than those of the past. While macro-level indicators are widely available and give a broad overview of the economies in different countries, the real situation is much more heterogeneous. On different levels of aggregation, different pictures emerge, showing that productivity and other important determinants of economic performance are not comprehensive without understanding the underlying patterns of the distribution. For this reason, the appliance of micro-level data has long since been a preferred option of scholars interested in productivity, innovation, investment, and competitiveness. But micro-data is often hard to come by, expensive and necessarily across different countries. 

Acknowledging these constraints and the high relevance of micro-based empirical research, CompNet provides a dataset consisting of micro-level firm data from many European countries. It is widely used in research and policy work alike and highly regarded for making micro-level analysis across countries without firm-level data possible. In most recent years the high cross-country comparability became another unique characteristic of the newest vintages of the dataset.

At this conference, data users are invited to present results generated out of the CompNet dataset, discuss the data quality and exchange experiences with the network. For the CompNet representatives, this is a unique opportunity to get feedback for the existing dataset and services as well as suggestions for future improvements.