How much do we know about firm activities around the world? To understand global firm networks and how they operate, we need consistent information about their activities that is not biased by firm reporting choices. In this paper, we collect a novel dataset on factory land consumption and the light these factories produce at night for a large sample of car manufacturing plants to provide such data. We show that we can measure firm activity with this data, using annual firm financial data and high-frequency data related to COVID-19 pandemic production shocks. We use this data to quantify the extent of unreported and misallocated global turnover and show the asset allocation across subsidiaries of multinational firms (MNCs) that is not biased by profit shifting.

Seminar in English