Datasets and Documentation

The publications in TRR 266 follow the Open Science principles. For example, scientific publications are marked with Gold status if they make data and/or code publicly available to all interested users, see https://www.accounting-for-transparency.de/de/publikationen/.

Please make sure to cite to honor intellectual honesty and correct attribution

for any use of the German Business Panel data or its derivatives.

In order to meet the strict data protection requirements, the German Business Panel provides completely anonymized microdata for scientific research and statistical purposes in the form of Public Use Files (PUF). Due to the high degree of anonymization, only selected characteristics are included in PUFs. Characteristics with a detailed subject classification are usually aggregated. Deeper spatial delimitations cannot be made on the basis of PUFs.

In addition, the German Business Panel provides structure files that are useful for preparing and checking Stata codes for controlled remote data processing. These files retain the structure of the variables of the original data: they have the same variable names and variable and value labels; sensitive characteristics are coarsened or excluded. It should be possible to build up the individual waves of the structure files into a longitudinal section so that correlations over time are not lost. Content-related evaluations are not possible with the structural data itself.

The prerequisite for data use is entering a data use agreement (a sample can be found on the right, please list all project staff and report if staff members leave or join) and the signing of the declaration of commitment for each project staff member. The use of the data is reserved exclusively for scientific institutions.