CI Technology Data Set

CiTDB includes two types of technology datasets: (i) hardware expenditures and (ii) product installs. Hardware expenditure data is constructed through a combination of surveys and modeling. A survey is administered to a number of companies and the data from surveys is used to develop a prediction model of expenditures as a function of firm characteristics. CiTDB uses this model to predict the expenditures of non-surveyed firms and reports them in the dataset. In contrast, CiTDB does not do any imputation for product install data, which comes entirely from web scraping and surveys. A confidence score between 1-3 is assigned to indicate how much the source of information can be trusted. A 3 corresponds to 90-100 percent install likelihood, 2 corresponds to 75-90 percent install likelihood and 1 corresponds to 65-75 percent install likelihood. CiTDB reports technology adoption at the site level with a unique DUNS identifier. One of these sites is identified as an “enterprise,” corresponding to the firm that owns the sites. Therefore, it is possible to analyze technology adoption both at the site (establishment) and enterprise (firm) levels. CiTDB sources the site population from Dun and Bradstreet every year and drops sites that are not relevant to their clients. Due to this sample selection, there is quite a bit of variation in the number of sites from year to year, where on average, 10-15 percent of sites enter and exit every year in the US data. This number is higher in the EU data. We observe similar turnover year-to-year in the products included in the dataset. Some products have become absolute, and some new products are added every year. There are two versions of the data: (i) version 3, which covers 2016-2020, and (ii) version 4, which covers 2020-2021. The quality of version 4 is significantly better regarding the information included about the technology products. In version 3, product categories have missing values, and they are abbreviated in a way that are sometimes difficult to interpret. Version 4 does not have any major issues. Since both versions of the data are available in 2020, CiTDB provides a crosswalk between the versions. This makes it possible to use information about products in Version 4 for the products in Version 3, with the caveats that there will be no crosswalk for the products that exist in 2016-2019 but not in 2020. Finally, special attention should be paid to data from 2016, where the coverage is significantly different from 2017. From 2017 onwards, coverage is more consistent.