![]() ![]() The merged dataset contains two export variables: overseas sales from FAME and data on actual exports from HMRC. We merge monthly HMRC transaction-level exports covering the period 2007 to 2010 with FAME, using a common firm identifier. In addition, they are not contaminated by the inclusion of local affiliate sales, which are conceptually different from exports. These data are derived from customs declaration forms associated with the physical shipment of goods across borders and should provide a more accurate picture than self-reported exports. We compare and contrast these FAME-reported values with those reported by another source of export information: the universe of UK transaction-level exports, collected and housed by HMRC. This is the variable used as a proxy for export status in the studies listed above and we will refer to it as either “overseas turnover” or simply “exports” throughout this note. In addition to reporting a long list of variables related to firm performance and firm finance, FAME also reports “overseas turnover”, a variable that primarily captures export sales but also includes the local (overseas) sales associated with the foreign affiliate of a UK firm. ![]() The first source is the UK’s FAME data, a financial reporting dataset produced by Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing, which includes balance sheet information for nearly all UK firms. We compare patterns of overseas sales across two data sources, restricting our analysis to the manufacturing sector in accordance with most of the literature. FAME has also been used extensively for the evaluation of export promotion policies. Recent work has explored the impact of exporting on R&D the impact of the financial crisis on exporting the relationship between the financial health of a firm, exporting, and firm survival the relationship between exporting and agglomeration economies the role of exchange rate uncertainty in the export decision the magnitude of learning-by-exporting the contribution of exporting to UK productivity growth the relationship between exporting and firm exit and firm heterogeneity in barriers to exporting. Researchers have used FAME to explore a range of questions, many of which address fundamental issues within the international trade literature, highlighting the need to understand the extent to which the data accurately reflect the UK economy. This is in part because UK customs data have only recently become accessible to researchers and the UK’s main firm-level production survey (the ABI/ABS) did not contain any information about goods exports until 2011 (and only a binary indicator for export status since then). ![]() While financial datasets are used as a source of export information for several countries, the UK’s FAME database is one of the most widely used. In particular, we are motivated by the possibility that these self-reported data may be systematically misreported, which may be very important to the extent that policy decisions are informed by estimates derived from these datasets. Here we explore the reliability of these financial datasets for international trade research, focusing on the UK and the Bureau van Dijk dataset FAME. and Ireland (FAME), Germany (dafne), India (Prowess), the Americas and Asia (Orbis), Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan (Ruslana), and Europe (Amadeus), to name just a few. These reports are made available to researchers and others by several private data providers, and are available for many countries and regions including the U.S. The most common sources for these data are customs records and surveys by national government statistics agencies, while the next most commonly used data come from the self-reports of firms in their end-of-fiscal-year financial reports. Firm-level datasets have been increasingly used to explore questions related to international trade.
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