Abstract

Bureau van Dijk is a commercial provider of company and business data. The FDZ has acquired data for over 2 million German companies from the orbis database. This data will be processed and linked to IAB administrative data via record linkage methods. The record linkage yields a key between the BvD data at the company level and administrative data at the establishment level. Additionally, this linked company-establishment data will be enriched by employment data at the individual level available at the IAB. Thus, a linked employer-employee dataset with three levels of observations will be created.
An anonymization concept for this new research dataset will be developed to comply with the requirements for social security data protection. The main challenge thereby lies in guaranteeing sufficient anonymization of longitudinal microdata, which for the first time not only includes establishment and individual information, but also information on the company level.
As the data provided by BvD is commercial, it cannot be offered to the research community for free. To allow FDZ users to analyze the data via the general processes of the FDZ, a new data access concept has to be developed.
We expect a high analytic potential for the generated linked-employer-employee data. A large number of research questions can be addressed, such as questions concerning the relationship between company productivity and employment structures, characteristics of successful companies, as well as the joint analysis of financial and labor markets.