Design and Implementation of a Historical German Firm-level Financial Database

Abstract

Broad, long-term financial, and economic datasets are scarce resources, particularly in the European context. In this article, we present an approach for an extensible data model that is adaptable to future changes in technologies and sources. This model may constitute a basis for digitized and structured long-term historical datasets for different jurisdictions and periods. The data model covers the specific peculiarities of historical financial and economic data and is flexible enough to reach out for data of different types (quantitative as well as qualitative) from different historical sources, hence, achieving extensibility. Furthermore, we outline a relational implementation of this approach based on historical German firm and stock market data from 1920 to 1932.