A Review and Reflection on the Use and Abuse of Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database

Empirical research has called for intensive use of disaggregated data. One of the most heavily used data set in studying the corporate behavior and performance in China is Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database. As we will show, this data set suffers from data matching problems as well as measurement errors, unrealistic outliers and definition ambiguities etc., all of which practically lead to research results thereupon that are at best questionable. In this article, we briefly summarize the data set, selectively review its uses in previous studies, address some critical issues regarding its usage, and propose some remedies and recommendations.