Global company & workforce data with 40+ years of work history for academic research

What is People Data Labs?

People Data Labs started in 2015 as a recruiting software company before growing into a broader data infrastructure provider. Today it standardizes thousands of compliantly sourced datasets into a single developer friendly source of truth, spanning both individual work history and company level firmographics. Dewey brought People Data Labs on as a partner to unlock that workforce intelligence data for research into human capital and business trends.

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What academic researchers should know about People Data Labs's company and workforce data

On Dewey, People Data Labs contributes two connected datasets. Company Insights covers more than 30 million businesses worldwide with data going back to 2010, including employee headcounts, average tenure, month over month growth and churn rates, top company metro areas, and executive leadership changes. People and Resume is an 18 table collection built around a core Person record, covering more than 50 years of individual work history: job titles with derived seniority levels, standardized academic degrees and majors, certifications, skills, and location history, all linkable back to company level records through shared identifiers.

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Why academic researchers choose People Data Labs on Dewey

People Data Labs classifies job title seniority deterministically, rather than relying on the language based clustering that some workforce data providers use, which makes comparisons across companies and over time more consistent. Company Insights and People and Resume share standardized entity fields, so researchers can move between individual level resume data and company level headcount trends without building their own crosswalks first. Paired with Revelio Labs for a second read on headcount and tenure trends, WageScape for wage levels by occupation and location, or BrightQuery for the financial outcomes tied to workforce changes, People Data Labs becomes the backbone of a broader workforce research design rather than a single input.

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People Data Labs academic research ideas and use cases

Return to office and workforce composition research already has a track record with this exact data on Dewey. Economists at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago used resume data from People Data Labs, accessed through Dewey, to estimate the causal effect of return to office mandates at Microsoft, Apple, and SpaceX, finding that senior and long tenured employees left at higher rates after each company required in person attendance, often for larger competitors.

Human capital and firm performance research can use the Company Insights growth and churn fields alongside executive leadership change data to study how workforce stability relates to company outcomes over time.

Labor market and talent flow research can use the People and Resume experience records to trace how employees move between companies, industries, and seniority levels, building on the kind of employee outflow analysis used in the return to office study above.

Corporate finance and investment research can pair Company Insights headcount and tenure trends with inferred revenue estimates to study how workforce changes precede or follow shifts in company performance.

Education and labor market outcomes research can use the standardized degree and major fields in People and Resume to study how educational background relates to job titles, seniority progression, and career trajectories across industries.

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