BrightQuery Explained: US Company Data for Academic Research
Academic researchers have long struggled with a gap between publicly available company data and the level of precision and completeness needed for robust empirical research.
BrightQuery is changing that by offering research-grade datasets built directly from US government filings. With more than 42 million active companies, including both public and private firms, BrightQuery is opening new possibilities for scholars in economics, finance, policy, and business.
The Breadth of BrightQuery’s Datasets
At the heart of BrightQuery’s offering is an exceptionally rich set of structured data sourced from official government filings, primarily the IRS, SEC, US Department of Labor, and state business registries. This approach ensures standardization and accuracy that surpasses many commercial data sources, which often rely on self-reported or scraped information.
BrightQuery provides company-level information across several critical dimensions:
- Company Financials: Revenue, assets, liabilities, and net income, and standard identifiers such as stock tickers and EINs (IRS filings).
- Employment & Benefits: Detailed payroll data, head counts, retirement plan participation, and insurance data (Form 5500 reports).
- Geographic Footprints: Company presence and employment data at the state and ZIP code level, enabling granular regional economic analysis.
This breadth and granularity allow researchers to investigate everything from innovation patterns and high-growth entrepreneurship to labor market dynamics and the impact of public policy.
How BrightQuery Stacks Up to Compustat and Others
In a landscape dominated by legacy business data providers, BrightQuery stands out for its accuracy, scope, and academic utility. Here’s what makes it different:
1. Rooted in Government Filings
Unlike most commercial databases that rely on scraped websites, surveys, or investor-facing documents, BrightQuery’s data comes directly from authoritative federal sources including business registration records and IRS forms. This sourcing ensures unbiased, legally attested data with national scope and consistent formats.
2. Longitudinal, Point-in-Time Data
BrightQuery maintains a point-in-time data architecture, preserving historical records as they were filed starting in 2010. This eliminates survivorship bias and enables rigorous longitudinal studies tracking firm evolution, ownership changes, employee growth, and more. Many other providers overwrite data or lack time-stamped records, limiting their research utility.
3. Private Company Coverage
While providers like Compustat focus on public companies, BrightQuery covers over 42 million active companies, the vast majority of which are small and medium-sized private businesses.
If your research involves labor markets, local economies, entrepreneurship, or policy impacts at the community level, BrightQuery gives you access to the long tail of the US economy.
4. Built for Research, Not Marketing
BrightQuery is engineered with researchers in mind—its schema, documentation, and delivery are optimized for reproducibility, statistical analysis, and academic workflows. That means clean entity resolution across years and business units and transparent field definitions with methodological notes.
To be clear, Compustat remains a gold standard in academic research for public company financials and long-term capital market research, but, for studying the full US corporate landscape including private businesses, regional economies, and employment-based metrics, BrightQuery provides a powerful and complementary dataset.
BrightQuery in Action: Research Highlight
BrightQuery data is already making an impact in the academic community. A recent paper by NYU researchers in the S&P Global Market Intelligence Paper Series, The Market Value of Pay Gaps: Evidence from EEO-1 Disclosures, used BrightQuery’s data to evaluate gender and racial pay gaps.
The findings:
- Private firms have larger pay gaps than public ones
- Pay gaps widen as firm size increases
- Despite ethical concerns, investors respond posibitvel to disclosed pay gaps suggesting that markets may not penalize inequity.
This research would not have been possible using traditional datasets that don’t include private employers. This is just one example of how BrightQuery is helping to power timely and impactful academic research.
Access BrightQuery Data on the Dewey Platform
Accessing BrightQuery is seamless through the Dewey Data platform. Preview, sample, and query the data for free with your university email address.
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