Professor Herman de Jong receives 800K grant for new Dutch database

De Jong receives the grant for building a new Dutch database holding Dutch corporate and stock exchange data for the period 1796-1980. The grant is awarded by the KNAW (Royal Dutch Academy of Science) in cooperation with digital infrastructures CLARIAH en ODISSEI.

De Jong: 'Teaching and research about large companies in business, finance and economics relies mainly on US data, easily available but not very relevant for the Netherlands. To remedy this we will 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.'

De Jong explains the societal relevance of the system: '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.

The database can be used by academics for teaching material and research, but is also interesting for financial and business journalists, as well as other economic data providers such as Datastream, Orbis, or the GF Database.'

De Jong will be working along with with professor Abe de Jong (Monash University and Erasmus University), professor Joost Jonker (University of Amsterdam/ IISG) and professor Oscar Gelderblom (Utrecht University) on the new database.