Spanish Banker Database (SBDb)

The Spanish Banker Database (SBDb) records the composition of boards of directors of banks, savings banks, and credit cooperatives in Spain between 1974 and 2018. Board members are classified as bankers, businessmen, or politicians. Coverage - Banks: since 1974 - Savings banks (cajas de ahorros): since 1983 - Credit cooperatives: since 1995 - 21,368+ individuals across 676 institutions - 135,000+ board and managerial positions Sources and methodologyData were compiled from financial yearbooks, commercial registries, and transparency portals. Name harmonization combined manual data entry, OCR, semantic matching algorithms (Damerau-Levenshtein and Jaro), and a systematic name-disambiguation protocol. To identify links with non-financial firms and political office-holders, the database draws on: - Records of 450,000 individuals holding legislative posts under the dictatorship, or local, regional, national, and European office during the democratic period - A directory of four million company directors Contributions - Methodological: a replicable protocol for building large-scale individual-name databases from heterogeneous sources, including systematic disambiguation and cross-source matching procedures. - Historiographical: 40 years of governance data on Spanish deposit-taking institutions, including their ties to business and political actors. - Institutional analysis: a dataset enabling future research on how board composition relates to risk and profitability. File structureSingle CSV file, generated via SQL query on the underlying relational database. One row per banker–year–position, integrating banking, political, and business-relationship data into a harmonized structure. Variables: - Banker identifier and reference year - Bank name (per year) - Position within the bank's organizational structure (code and label) - Indicators for business relationships (business_matching), political relationships (political_matching), or both (political_and_business) - Related company information: company name, NACE Rev. 2 code