Finding Business Data: Data Sources

"The USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) conducts hundreds of surveys every year and prepares reports covering virtually every aspect of U.S. agriculture. Production and supplies of food and fiber, prices paid and received by farmers, farm labor and wages, farm finances, chemical use, and changes in the demographics of U.S. producers are only a few examples."

Contains data from 1840-2002. "The Census of Agriculture, taken every five years, is a complete count of U.S. farms and ranches and the people who operate them. The Census looks at land use and ownership, operator characteristics, production practices, income and expenditures, and many other areas."

Crop reports from 1940-2013.

Find data related to arrests, parole, probation, and more.

"The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program has been the starting place for law enforcement executives, students of criminal justice, researchers, members of the media, and the public at large seeking information on crime in the nation."

The ARDA Data Archive is a collection of surveys, polls, and other data related to religion submitted by researchers and made available online by the ARDA.

"The Child Trends DataBank examines and monitors more than 100 indicators that focus on risks and positive developments for children."

Find key disability data sources.

"Contains links to sites with statistical information and published reports on subjects such as U.S. military casualties (DCAS), aggregated roster immunization reports (ICRS), and military training and readiness reports (START)."

"Contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings."

Find international data on education, gender inequality, life expectancy, and more.

"ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields."

"The MMP Database is the result of an ongoing multidisciplinary study of Mexican Migration to the United States. It contains data gathered since 1982 in surveys administered every year in Mexico and in the United States."

Contains links to international population data.

"The NSFH was designed to provide a broad range of information on family life.... Interviews were conducted in 1987-88, 1992-94, and 2001-2003."

Key data sets published by the Office of Immigration Statistics.

The Bureau's webpage has information and statistics on regional, national, and international economic issues.

Find freely available economic time series data in one convenient location.

The International Monetary Fund's IFS database contains data on exchange rates, commodity prices, consumer prices, interest rates, and other economic indicators.

Historical time series data for the U.S. economy which includes daily U.S. interest rates, CPI, PPI, GDP, monetary data, exchange rates, balance of payments and more. Data may be exported into Excel or text files.

"The CBOE Volatility Index® (VIX®) is a key measure of market expectations of near-term volatility conveyed by S&P 500 stock index option prices."

"Use searchable databases to find information on specific banks, their branches, and the industry."

Find data on home mortgage lending activity and private mortgage insurance companies.

"NAHB produces in-depth economic analyses of the home building industry based on private and government data. Our economics group surveys builders, home buyers, and renters to gain insight into the issues and trends driving the industry."

A list of datasets related to trade, healthcare, patents and more.

"SIPP collects data and measures change for many topics including: economic well-being, family dynamics, education, assets, health insurance, childcare, and food security."

"USAID maintains the official database for OECD/DAC and Greenbook reporting for assistance provided by the U.S. Government to the rest of the world, from 1946 to the present."

Create a free account to find data related to international business.

This page contains information about education data tools that are available from government agencies.

"Kids Count is a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation to track the well-being of children in the United States."

Find data on colleges and universities, public schools, and private schools in the US.

Data on school construction and school buildings through 2012.

The Election Administration and Voting Survey "captures quantitative data pertaining to the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), and other election administration issues such as the counting of provisional ballots and poll worker recruitment. The second part is the Statutory Overview, which asks states a series of open-ended questions about their election laws, definitions, and procedures."

"This archive contains data on election results, voting behavior, and electoral politics, with particular focus on the United States. The core data for the archive are state, county and district level election returns for all recent state and federal elections in the United States."

Contains data files on campaign finance.

The dataset and documentation currently include 1,494 elections from 129 countries.

"Provides information on the results of both national and subnational elections around the world.... All parties are included in the database regardless of the number of votes that they won. The data are based on countries' official election results and have been amassed from various government institutions."

A collaboration between the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Latin American Energy Organization (OLADE), the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD). Data on oil and gas.

Data on coal, electricity, natural gas, and more.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN collects data on global water topics.

The United Nations Environment Programme organizes data related to global environmental issues.

"UN-Water is the United Nations inter-agency coordination mechanism for all freshwater and sanitation related matters."

"NCEI is the world’s largest provider of weather and climate data. Land-based, marine, model, radar, weather balloon, satellite, and paleoclimatic are just a few of the types of datasets available."

Data on population, natural systems, climate, agriculture, and more.

"SEDAC focuses on human interactions in the environment. Its mission is to develop and operate applications that support the integration of socioeconomic and Earth science data and to serve as an "Information Gateway" between the Earth and social sciences."

Data relevant to global change and earth science research.

Archives and distributes scientific data from NASA planetary missions, astronomical observations, and laboratory measurements.

The NHCS conducts a number of health-related surveys and makes the data available via their website.

Find global HIV/AIDS data.

"Labour statistics describe the size, structure, characteristics, outputs and contributions of the participants in the labour market and how these change over time. From an economic perspective, these statistics are useful to analyse, evaluate and monitor the way the economy is performing and the effectiveness of current and longer term economic policies."

Contains data the areas of finance, technology, investment and sustainable development from national and international sources. Most of the time series cover long periods, with some dating back to 1948, for almost all economies of the world.

"This database is maintained by the Statistical Division of the UNECE Secretariat. It provides free access to data structured to facilitate easy retrieval of statistics by users. It is organised by subject or policy areas. Multi-dimensional tables present data by country, by various socio-economic classifications related to the context, and by time period."

Find up-to-date employment statistics for making comparisons between countries and identifying trends over time.

"The ICTWSS database covers four key elements of modern political economies: trade unionism, wage setting, state intervention and social pacts. The database contains annual data for all OECD and EU member states."

The MISSOC Comparative Tables Database contains detailed information on social protection in 32 countries, including financing, healthcare, sickness, maternity/paternity, invalidity, old age, survivors, accidents at work and occupational diseases, family, unemployment, guaranteed minimum resources and long-term care.

A "comprehensive source for sports statistics and data.... Our focus will be on the statistics side of things but we'll also provide historical and other data for all players, leagues and teams."

"[Brought] to you by the Office of Postsecondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. This analysis cutting tool was designed to provide rapid customized reports for public inquiries relating to equity in athletics data."

"GOALS is an NCAA study of the experiences and well-being of current student-athletes."

Find results for a specific sport or medalist.

"A combination of sites providing top notch statistics and resources for sports fans everywhere."

Links to sports data on American Football, Baseball, Basketball, Cricket, Cycling, Fencing, Golf, Hockey, Olympics, Poker, Racing, Rugby, Soccer, Tennis, and Volleyball.

Historical stats and data dating back to the NBA's first season in 1946.

Find and download data for various modes of transportation, specific regions, and different subjects.

"The International Transport Forum collects data relevant to a range of transport policy issues. It maintains historical databases and publishes analysis and indicators regarding the transport sector."

"The Airline Data Project aggregates airline data from the U.S. DOT’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)."

Statistical office of the European Union.

Contains over 186,770 datasets from government entities. Find information on everything from student loans, precipitation rates, and consumer complaints.

A free and easy way to find, access and use quality data on Africa. It contains data from all of Afrobarometer’s Rounds 1-5 (1999-2012) covering 33 countries.

"DBpedia is a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make this information available on the Web."

The data base contains all the latest available data and indicators, for education, literacy, science, technology and innovation, as well as culture. It also contains updated country and regional profiles, global rankings and other interactive tools.

Called the "social network for data people," this relatively new site lets you sign up and share datasets with other researchers, or download datasets that may have been manipulated or changed to be just what you need for your own research.

"Creating a platform that monitors the world's news media from nearly every corner of every country in print, broadcast, and web formats, in over 100 languages, every moment of every day and that stretches back to January 1, 1979 through present day, with daily updates..."

A collection of great animated graphs and some numerical data sets illustrating the history of business in America, generally from 1900-present.