InfoUSA / Data Axle business and consumer files (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

InfoUSA / Data Axle files are a paid licensed product (Data Axle, formerly InfoUSA), so they carry no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no Data Axle credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Data Axle (formerly InfoUSA, also known historically as infoGROUP) compiles commercial business and consumer reference files: establishment listings with name, address, geocode, industry (SIC/NAICS), and employment/sales estimates, plus consumer household files. The business file is used in research to get establishment-level location and employment counts, including for small and private firms not in other databases. A paper we distill uses it: Allcott, Montanari, Ozaltun & Tan use InfoUSA for firm-level county employment counts in their analysis of corporate social impact.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: Data Axle (formerly InfoUSA / infoGROUP).
• Coverage: U.S. establishments and consumer households, broad but compiled-and-estimated rather than administrative; annual snapshots with geocodes and industry codes.

Access (when licensed)

• Through a Data Axle licence or a research archive. Files are obtained under a commercial licence; some historical InfoUSA business-file vintages are available to researchers through data archives. Check which route your institution provides.
• Keyed by establishment. An extract is a set of establishments with location, industry, and employment for a geography and year.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Compiled and estimated, not administrative. Listings are assembled from directories, phone records, and modeling; employment and sales are often estimated, not reported. Treat employment counts as estimates, not a census like the QWI or BLS.
• Coverage and accuracy vary by firm size and industry. Small and new establishments are missed or stale; the file lags openings and closings. Do not read absence as nonexistence.
• Establishment, not firm. Records are establishments (locations); rolling up to the firm requires the corporate-linkage fields, which are imperfect. Decide the unit deliberately.
• Vintage snapshots and definition changes. The file is a periodic snapshot and the compilation methodology has changed across the InfoUSA-to-Data-Axle history; a panel across vintages is not perfectly consistent. Pin the vintage.
• Industry coding. SIC/NAICS assignment is vendor-applied and can be coarse or wrong for diversified establishments. Verify industry codes before conditioning on them.
• Duplicate and merged records. The same establishment can appear under variant names or be merged across files; dedupe before counting.

Citation

Cite the vendor, e.g.: Data Axle (formerly InfoUSA) business file, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the vintage/year, the geography, the unit (establishment vs firm), and that employment figures are compiled estimates.