Organization and Management Theory OMT

Open source data initiative: corporate size and income inequality around the world

Are you interested in employment and organizational size?  Curious about how income inequality varies around the world?   Interested in swapping data?

Recent research hints at an intriguing link between the size of corporate employers and income inequality.  In the US, the two are almost perfectly (negatively) correlated over time.

In order to better understand the link between corporations and inequality, we are creating an open source database to allow researchers to share data and insights.  We are especially interested in data that other researchers might have on employment levels at the largest companies around the world. We have assembled annual data on the name and number of employees of the 100 largest companies in the US and several other countries, and would like to create a single open site for sharing similar data from around the world.  (It's harder than it might sound for those outside a country to figure out reliable sources of data on non-financial aspects of corporations, such as employment size.)

If you are interested in obtaining the data we have thus far collected or are interesting in contributing to our data collection effort, please visit us at http://www.worldinequality.org/. 

Jerry Davis (U of Michigan) and Adam Cobb (Wharton)

PS: If you're willing to contribute data (particularly from outside the US/UK/Canda), here's what a sample entry might look like: