Company Births, Deaths and Marriages: Flaws in Age Fields in Business Microdata

Abstract

In identifying gazelles (generally defined in the literature as young, fast growing businesses) researchers traditionally rely on commercially available databases not designed for scholarly work, to identify a pool of suitable study participants. This paper discusses systemic biases in the most commonly-deployed databased used in gazelle studies, the Dun and Bradstreet database, with a focus on the Australian market.