The Cambridge Business Diversity Directory is a tool connecting local businesses owned by historically excluded proprietors to customers. The Directory aims to elevate businesses owned by women, people of color, veterans, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and individuals of Portuguese descent. The Directory serves as a marketing and networking tool to connect these businesses with consumers, companies, and other institutions.

Those listed in this directory range in longevity, from businesses and entities that recently opened in Cambridge to legacy businesses and entities that have been in operation over 50 years. Businesses and entities listed in this edition have elected to be listed as self-identifying members of a historically excluded group. Though the Cambridge Business Diversity Directory is updated regularly, it is not a comprehensive representation of the many diverse businesses and entities operating in the city.

The Cambridge Centre for Business Research Survey of Knowledge Exchange Activity with Universities by United Kingdom Companies, 2017-2021 contains the results of an online survey of directors of UK companies in 2020-2021.

The survey was designed to assess the extent and nature of the knowledge exchange interactions of their companies with the university sector. It covers the three-year period to March 2020 prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and questions relating to the subsequent impact of the pandemic on knowledge exchange patterns. The researchers inquired about 33 modes of interaction grouped into four broad categories. These were commercialisation (3 modes), people-based (10 modes), problem-solving (12 modes) and community-based (4 modes).

The survey covers a sample of 3,823 companies in all sectors, regions and countries of the UK and employment sizes ranging from micro-firms less than 10 employees, to the largest public listed corporations. The response rate was 4.4 per cent and a detailed response bias analyses by survey wave and prompt wave showed largely insignificant sample response bias compared to the sampling frame drawn from the FAME database of all UK companies.

The dataset provides a unique source of data on a critical period of challenge for knowledge exchange in the UK. David Sweeney, the then Executive Director of Research England which sponsored the survey commented on an initial report of results in 2022 that "This report which has an exclusive focus on company interactions with universities, is an important addition to our understanding of the collaboration process" (The Changing State of Business-University Interactions in the UK. Centre for Business Research and NCUB. 2022 p2).

The survey dataset contains many variables comparable with a similar previous postal survey of an earlier period by two members of the current research team. The data from this is available from the Data Archive under SN 6464 - Cambridge Centre for Business Research Survey of Knowledge Exchange Activity by United Kingdom Businesses, 2005-2009.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The main objective of the research project was to create a longitudinal panel database of SME data relating to a wide range of non-financial and attitudinal characteristics, and a limited number of financial variables not normally available in modified company accounts, from a national postal survey. This database forms the beginning of the second panel - the first panel was started in 1991. A postal survey was sent to over 10,000 independent small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing and business services sectors in England, Scotland and Wales. Just over half (5,430) the firms were telephoned prior to being sent the questionnaire, and 4,640 firms were sent the questionnaire blind.
One other study concerned with SMEs by the same Principal Investigator(s) is held at the UK Data Archive under SN 4156.
Main Topics:

The questionnaire covered the following topics: general business characteristics; workforce and training; commercial activity and competitive situation; innovation; factors affecting expansion and efficieny; acquisition activity, capital expenditure and finance.

This is the latest version of the Global VAR (GVAR) dataset - a global modelling framework for analyzing the international macroeconomic transmission of shocks while accounting for drivers of economic activity, interlinkages and spillovers between different countries, and the effects of unobserved or observed common factors. This dataset includes quarterly macroeconomic variables for 33 economies (log real GDP, y, the rate of inflation, dp, short-term interest rate, r, long-term interest rate, lr, the log deflated exchange rate, ep, and log real equity prices, eq, as well as quarterly data on commodity prices (oil prices, poil, agricultural raw material, pmat, and metals prices, pmetal), from 1979Q2 to 2023Q3. These 33 countries cover more than 90% of world GDP.

It would be appreciated if use of the updated dataset could be acknowledged as: “Mohaddes, K. and M. Raissi (2024). Compilation, Revision and Updating of the Global VAR (GVAR) Database, 1979Q2-2023Q3. University of Cambridge: Judge Business School (mimeo)”.

For more details on Global VAR (GVAR) modelling, see also www.mohaddes.org/gvar

This database gives the coded directors and their companies as listed in the Directory of Directors for years 1882, 1892, 1902, 1912 (judged the most relevant for the census years) and also codes those linked to census records 1881-1911 for which their full census record is available in BBCE and linked to I-CeM. Record linkage match between DoD and censuses was 36% for 18,200 directors; but the database gives all DOD directors coded to business sectors, locations, and roles they played in each company.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

In January 2004, a consortium of public and private sector organisations commissioned Warwick Business School to carry out the United Kingdom Survey of Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises' (SME) Finances, 2004. This was the first representative survey of SMEs to offer a close analysis of businesses with fewer than 250 employees, their main owners and their access to external finance. A second survey was conducted in 2008, where business owners were interviewed by telephone about the finances they have used or applied for in the last three years, their financial relationships, the characteristics of the business and personal details.

In 2007, another consortium of UK public sector bodies, small business representative organisations and finance providers agreed to sponsor a similar survey to the 2004 survey, conducted by the Centre for Business Research based at the University of Cambridge. This study is held at the UKDA under SN 6049, with the title United Kingdom Survey of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises' Finances, 2007. It aimed to compile another benchmark and to identify any changes or trends that had emerged since 2004, but made a number of changes to the 2004 questionnaire, so that it is not a direct member of the UKSMEF series, but stands alongside it as a separate cross-sectional survey. The UKSMEF 2008 survey was conducted by the same Principal Investigator as the 2004 survey, based at Warwick Business School, and the 2008 report provides direct comparison between the 2004 and 2008 surveys.

The aims of the 2008 survey were to:

• provide benchmarking data on the availability of credit to SMEs and the types of finance used
• collect information on the relationship between SMEs and their providers of finance
• develop a general purpose micro database for quantitative research on business finance (offering, for example, scope for comparisons with the US Survey of Small Business Finances)

Main Topics:

Topics covered in the survey included

• personal characteristics of the owner/manager
• firm demographics
• providers of finance
• use of current accounts, deposit accounts, trade credit, commercial loans and mortgages, assets and asset-based finance, credit cards and equity finance
• income and balance sheet information

Special questions were also included for 'start-up' businesses less than two years old.

U.S. government investments in energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) at the Department of Energy (DOE) from 1978

The CBR Leximetric Datasets are the product of work carried out at the Centre for Business Research (CBR) in Cambridge, beginning in 2005 when the Centre received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to carry out a research project on law, development and finance. Further funding from the ESRC, the European Union's FP5 and FP6 programmes, the Isaac Newton Trust, the Cambridge Political Economy Society and the International Labour Organization made it possible to expand the original datasets to their current state. As of December 2023, there are three principal datasets, coding, respectively, for labour laws in 117 countries between 1970 and 2022 (the CBR Labour Regulation Index), shareholder protection in 30 countries between 1990 and 2013 (the CBR Extended Shareholder Protection Index), and creditor protection in 30 countries between 1990 and 2013 (the CBR Extended Creditor Protection Index). The coding of legal data is carried out using a leximetric coding methodology developed in the CBR and more fully explained in the codebooks which accompany each of the datasets. Taken together, the datasets provide a unique time series which enables researchers and other research users to track changes in labour, company and insolvency law over long periods of time for many countries. A distinguishing feature of these datasets is that all legal sources for the data coding are fully described in the relevant codebooks, thereby assisting transparency, external validity and replicability of results. The 2023 update of the CBR-LRI provides a further decade or so of labour law codings following the previous publication of this dataset. Funding for the update was made possible by the ESRC via its Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (grant ES/S012532/1) and through the NORFACE consortium grant to the POPBACK project (Populist Backlash, Democratic Backsliding, and the Future of the Rule of Law in Europe). The work of further developing the datasets on shareholder and creditor rights, so that they match the labour regulation index in terms of years and countries covered, is ongoing.