Data Room

The Data Room is an internationally unique pilot project for the promotion of data driven policy making. It is an independent part of the VATT Institute for Economic Research, and its purpose is to combine the latest individual level registry data to produce accurate analysis at a fast pace to support decision-making better and to evaluate the effects of political decisions. The unit has been granted three-year funding for 2023 to 2025 from the Ministry of Finance (Finland).

The Data Room works in close cooperation with Statistics Finland and the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics. Statistics Finland is responsible for combining different sets of register data and delivering them to the researchers and analysts working for the Data Room. Researchers working at the Helsinki GSE expand the economic research expertise of the Data Room. Their work is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Education (Finland). The Data Room is led by Director Henna Laasonen.

The Data Room’s research activities are currently organised into three research groups. Professor Otto Toivanen (Aalto university) leads the Business group, which has examined e.g., the effects of the Russian sanctions on Finnish companies’ exports, the effects of energy price hikes on Finnish companies and firm productivity. The Environment and Energy group captained by Associate Professor Lassi Ahlvik (University of Helsinki) has studied e.g., household energy subsidies. Recently is established Education, Labour Markets and Households group.

Data Room as a basis for knowledge-based decision-making

Statistics Finland compiles data from society and ensures their data protection and data secure processing. The collected data are administrative register data and materials from data collections, for example. VATT organises the Data Room activities and examines and analyses the data. Helsinki GSE supports the Data Room in data analysis and competence development. The Data Room supplies the studies and analyses it produces to ministries for decision-making and evaluation of measures.

A diagram about Data Room's process. The content is expalained in the text before.

Press releases

Russian invasion of Ukraine has had only minor economic effects on Finnish firms that used to trade with Russia (26.9.2023)

Further information

The Dataroom webpages (in Finnish) datahuonepilotti.fi