Microeconomic Research Data Hub (MiRDH)
The Microeconomic Research Data Hub (MiRDH) of the National Bank of Belgium (NBB) is a centralised point of access for academic researchers and institutions to microeconomic datasets for research purposes.
By means of this initiative the NBB wishes to provide high-quality, secure access to microeconomic datasets to academic researchers, in compliance with confidentiality rules. The datasets may contain information on non-financial corporations, credit institutions or households.
Pilot phase
The Bank is launching a pilot phase in 2023 and is calling for applications based on a first set of firm-level microeconomic data. External datasets can be pseudonymised and merged with MiRDH datasets by the MiRDH team.
All research projects will be reviewed, and a research and confidentiality agreement will be concluded for accepted projects.
Remote access to pseudonymised data will be provided through the National Bank of Belgium’s IT infrastructure.
At a later stage, additional firm-level datasets will be added, along with data on households and financial institutions. Research projects involving confidential datasets which cannot be made available can be submitted outside the context of the pilot phase. These will require NBB co-authorship; acceptance will depend on NBB interest and resource availability.