Gauging Past Performance. Creating Financial Metadata for Economics, Finance, and Economic History in the Netherlands
Applicant: prof. dr. Herman de Jong (University of Groningen)
Finance teaching and research in the Netherlands relies entirely on US data, easily available but not very relevant for the country. To remedy this, we build NEDHISFIRM, a comprehensive information system holding Dutch corporate and stock exchange data for the period 1796-1980. Historians and economists collaborate closely to provide new and vital data for understanding the long-term evolution of Dutch financial markets, firms and public finance in their societal context. Modelled closely on proven systems in Belgium and France, NEDHISFIRM supplies innovative standards of documentation bringing together metadata formats and an architecture facilitating the next generation of data-extraction and enrichment systems from historical sources.
We need this system because comprehensive Dutch data add significantly to current European efforts to provide a necessary corrective to dominant, US-derived, assumptions about modern finance and financial market evolution. Moreover, systems connecting long-term corporate and financial data facilitating in-depth analyses of a country’s financial system have been or are being made everywhere, so Dutch universities need urgently to catch up. NEDHISFIRM fills the rapidly growing demand for digital corporate information from economists and economic historians and thus tallies with a sister project (main applicant Dr. Wolter Hassink) providing such information for the period from 2021.