from other economic factors.

We employ a new worldwide establishment dataset, WorldBase, that reports the performance of over 12 million establishments in 2005-2008. This dataset provides several distinct advantages over alternative data sources. First, unlike many other sources that lag considerably in assembling data, WorldBase reports updated 2008 operational information for establishments around the world.<sup>7</sup> Although the data coverage still does not re‡ect world population, it enables us to provide one of the ...rst systematic micro-level analysis on the recent crisis.

Second, the dataset, covering establishment activities both before and during the Global Financial Crisis, enables us to compare the role of foreign ownership during the crisis with the non-crisis years. Using the non-crisis period as a counterfactual helps us identify the e¤ect of foreign ownership, including production and ...nancial linkages, on establishment responses to adverse economic shocks.

Third, central to our analysis, the unit of observation in WorldBase is establishment (a single physical location at which production operations or services are performed) instead of ...rm. Establishments have their own addresses, business names, and managers, but might be partly or wholly owned by other ...rms. The database supports the linking of establishments to ...rms using information on domestic and global parents and the DUNS identi...cation.<sup>8</sup> Fourth, the dataset covers a larger number of countries than alternative data sources, enabling a comprehensive analysis of the crisis for both developed and developing nations and for countries at the epicenter as well as on the periphery of the crisis. It also allows us to investigate how the role of foreign ownership varies across countries depending on the incidences of the crisis.

WorldBase is compiled by Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) and covers public and private enterprises in over 100 countries and territories. Dun & Bradstreet has been the leading source of commercial credit and marketing information since 1845, and presently operates in more than a dozen countries and territories either directly or through a¢ liates, agents, and associated business partners. D&B compiles data from a wide range of sources including public registries, partner ...rms, telephone directory records, and websites, and veri...es all information centrally via a variety of manual and automated checks. Early uses of the D&B data include Caves’(1975) size and diversi...cation pattern comparisons between Canadian and U.S. domestic plants and subsidiaries of U.S. multinationals in Canada, and Lipsey’s (1978) comparisons of the D&B data with existing sources with regard to the reliability of U.S. data.

> 7 For example, the latest UNIDO INDSTAT 2009 Database, an authority industry-level data source, reports industrial data only up to 2007. The OECD STAN Database, another widely used industry-level dataset, currently provides 2008 data for only 13 OECD countries.

> 8 To identify businesses numerically for data-processing purposes, D&B introduced in 1963 the Data Universal Numbering System (the D-U-N-S Number). The system supports the linking of plants and ...rms across countries and tracking of plant histories including name changes.

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