Orbis (Bureau van Dijk): global firm financials and ownership (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

Orbis is a licensed commercial dataset (Bureau van Dijk, a Moody’s Analytics company), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no BvD 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.

Orbis is a global firm-level database from Bureau van Dijk (a Moody’s Analytics company). It aggregates financial statements, ownership and corporate-structure links, and firm identifiers sourced from national business registers and filings for public and (especially) private companies across countries. It is used in, for example Greenwald, Krainer & Paul (firm financials in the credit-line-channel analysis), and Bias, Lochner, Obernberger & Sevilir (firm structure around going public).

• Cost: licensed, subscription. Institution-specific modules and country coverage determine scope and price. Usually a direct BvD license, not via WRDS.
• Vendor: Bureau van Dijk / Moody’s Analytics.
• Coverage: hundreds of millions of firms globally, public and private. Financial-statement depth is uneven by country: deeper in countries with mandatory account filing (much of Europe), thinner in the US.

Access (when licensed)

• BvD Orbis platform. The common access route is the Orbis web interface for ad hoc queries, batch extract requests, or the BvD data feed or API, keyed on the BvD ID.
• Institution-hosted vintage. Some institutions maintain a historical Orbis vintage on a research server; access rules are institution-specific.
• Credentials and an active license are required. Keep them in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

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

• Country coverage is deeply uneven. Europe has detailed filings due to mandatory account-filing requirements; US coverage is thin for private firms. Cross-country comparisons are biased by differences in reporting regimes; document the country-specific coverage gaps in your sample.
• The live platform does not retain prior vintages. BvD historically overwrote records rather than preserving history, so building a true panel requires archived annual disks or institutional vintages. Back-filled and restated figures change history silently in the live product.
• Survivorship bias. Dead and dissolved firms can drop out of the live product, biasing samples toward survivors. Use historical vintages and document how you handle firm exit.
• Consolidation codes must be chosen deliberately. Orbis carries both consolidated and unconsolidated accounts for the same firm; mixing them double-counts economic activity. State the consolidation code and apply it consistently.
• The BvD ID is not stable. Identifiers can change across BvD products (Orbis, Amadeus, Zephyr) and across vintages. Linking across products or vintages requires a crosswalk; pin the identifier scheme and vintage before any merge.
• Ownership links are point-in-time. Ownership-structure data reflects a snapshot, not a panel. Building ownership histories requires multiple vintages and explicit handling of the observation date for each link.
• Currency, accounting standard, and units fields must be normalized. Orbis mixes currencies, IFRS and local GAAP, and sometimes inconsistent units across countries and sources; pooling without normalization produces garbage comparisons.

Citation

Cite the product and vendor, e.g.: Orbis firm-level data, Bureau van Dijk (Moody’s Analytics), vintage [disk/year], consolidation code [C1/C2/U1/U2], country sample [list], accessed [date]. State the vintage or disk, the consolidation code, the country sample, and how survivorship and restatements were handled in your sample construction.