The lecture course «Firm-level Empirical Surveys: Tools and Practice» is a special course for students specializing in institutional analysis, firm economy and management. These lectures are helpful for development of research capabilities of graduate and post-graduate students. The goal of the course is to provide a description of empirical firm-level surveys: history of their development in Russia, methods and types of information, and possible application for economic theory and state policy design. One of important objectives of the course is to promote students’ propensity to study realities of Russian economy by implementing empirical firm-level studies based on surveys of top-managers and owners of enterprises.

Survey methodology for obtaining data is one of the most popular in sociology. At the same time application of these methods and tools in firm-level economic analysis – especially in combination with traditionally applied economic methods and data – has specific features. Working with managers’ surveys data is not very common for economists and they are often incorrect in their interpretations of results. That’s why the course based on long experience in conducting empirical surveys of Russian enterprises describes possible ways for data collection and analysis based on real or adjusted cases, and also discusses limitations of surveys tools including quality of data and typical mistakes in analysis.

The course includes four main topics. The first one published in this issue consists of two lectures. They describe an enterprise (firm) as an object for empirical research and possible types of available information. Two next topics characterize the most wide-spread types of surveys methodology and tools: formalized surveys and in-depth interviews with CEOs and top-managers of companies. Last topic is devoted to the development of applied firm-level studies of Russian businesses in 1990–2000s.