Linking macro- and microdata to produce distributional accounts for non-financial corporations

In the last decade, there has been an increased demand for distributional information, consistent with aggregate national account statistics, in order to identify groups more affected by shocks or assess the effects of different policies. Up to now, national central banks and statistical institutes have addressed this need mainly for the household sector. This paper argues for the need to produce non-financial corporation distributional accounts. Specifically, we investigate the feasibility of creating these accounts, focusing on statistics that capture firms' ability to generate cash flows through their business or to obtain financial resources from the financial system. Our primary statistics of interest are corporate saving and its main components, and corporate funding. By exploiting business surveys combined with updated balance sheets, we assess the differences in concepts and definitions between surveys and national accounts. We discuss two classes of differences: the first affects all instruments and mainly refers to the reference population; the second is instrument-specific and may depend on differences in evaluation criteria or on items that are included in national accounts but not in surveys.