Firm-level environmental data SOW revised.pdf

Statement of Work for the Purchase of Data on Firm-level Environmental Expenditures and Revenues

1. Introduction/Background BEA currently provides many economic measurements as part of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs), which are part of the UN’s System of National Accounts (SNA) statistical standard. In the last decade, the UN Statistical Commission has approved two complementary statistical standards for environmental-economic measurement as part of the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA).

While the BEA does not yet produce environmental-economic accounts, 90 countries around the world produce them alongside the NIPAs for a variety of purposes in setting national economic policy and in forecasting and interpreting macroeconomic activity.

BEA, as one of the world’s leading statistical agencies, collects source data, conducts research and analysis, develops and implements estimation methodologies and disseminates statistics to the public. BEA collects source data for specific sectors of the economy from a variety of data sources. To produce these accounts, BEA must first conduct research on their feasibility in the U.S. with data that currently exists.

In recent years, BEA has launched several pilot research initiatives to explore the feasibility of producing environmental-economic accounts, which have included land, water, and other assets. In these projects, BEA researchers estimated pilot accounts and/or examined the landscape of existing data sources to understand what data would need to be collected by BEA or its partnering statistical agencies to fill in relevant gaps.

To produce environmental activity accounts – which quantify and value economic activities whose primary purpose is environmental – BEA would need to construct an industry account similar to the satellite accounts for Outdoor Recreation, Marine Economy, or the Space Economy. Currently, the BEA relies on input-output data from the Economic Census that split economic activity among product and industry codes for constructing these types of accounts. However, these accounts require supplementary data sources to fill in gaps with the existing data. Likewise, environmental economic accounts will require firm-level data to fill in gaps, like estimating percentages of certain industry input/output associated with environmental goods and services.

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data can provide detailed firm-level data on environmental-related expenditures and revenues for about 10,000 firms from 2002- 2021. Many public companies now voluntarily issue disclosures and reports on ESG activities, which data companies now collect and organize into a central database that can be used for research purposes or production of statistics. These reports contain itemized environmental-related expenditures, revenues, and other financial information that is not often reported in their annual 10K reports and therefore not in common firm-level databases such as those maintained by Compustat or Bloomberg.

ESG data would help BEA researchers complete research to construct pilot SEEA-based environmental goods and services sector (EGSS) accounts and environmental protection expenditure (EPE) accounts. Further, this research will help document gaps that would need to be filled if BEA were to pursue a formal set of accounts, including the degree to which financial information produced by the private sector can complement official collections from Census, BLS, and other agencies.

2. Scope The objective of this procurement is to obtain firm-level Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data that contains detailed information from ESG disclosures of publicly traded firms, which include environmental-related expenditures (costs) and revenues (outputs) spanning the last two decades. The data should cover the period from 2002 up to 2021 and should contain a large set (10,000+) of national and multinational firms.

3. Specifications

The contractor shall provide a dataset that includes data quantifying firm-level environmental expenditures, environmental R&D expenditures, environmental provisions, and other environmental-related revenues and costs (specified below), among other standard information relevant for linking firm-level data to other firm-level datasets and/or industry data sets that can be linked by industry/product codes.

This data must be current to the previous year (2021), going back to at least 2002. The data should be updated quarterly and include the most recent data as it becomes available.

Specifically, the dataset should include the following environmental “ESG Source Metric” variables and company/period identifiers to be able to evaluate those variables by industry, geography, and time. Note that our interest is not limited to the ESG score measure itself, but the underlying “source metric” inputs that correspond to firm expenditures and revenues. This includes firm-level data on:

• Statement Detail identifiers:

o Organization ID o Financial Period End Date o Financial Period Fiscal Year

• Innovation, emission, and other revenue/expenditure amounts and indicators:

o Environmental R&D Expenditures o Environmental R&D Expenditures to Revenues o Environmental Expenditures o Environmental Expenditure Investments o Environmental Provisions o Self Reported Environmental Fines o Climate Change Commercial Risks Opportunities

Note that the variables also often require multiple secondary variables (e.g., variables describing their currency, time period, and sources) to be able to combine the dollar value variables by geography, period, or industry.

As noted in the list above, each of these variables would need accompanying information to identify the firm (Organization ID) and corresponding quarters/years these expenditures/revenues occurred. For cross-verification of the data and necessary supplemental analysis, the data should also include the following variables that would allow us to cross-link the data with other firm-level datasets, such as:

• stock ticker (or cusip number)

• international securities identification number (isin).

The data must be downloadable from a website as json, jsonl, csv, or Rda files.

The award will be a fixed price purchase order with one year with an option to purchase two more years.

4. Period of Performance

12 months from date of award.