Synthetic Longitudinal Business Databases for International Comparisons

• Activity Number: 411
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Joerg Drechsler* and Lars Vilhuber
• Companies: Institute for Employment Research and Cornell University
• Keywords: confidentiality ; multiple imputation ; synthetic data ; Longitudinal Business Database ; business data

Abstract

International comparison studies on economic activity are often hampered by the fact that access to business microdata is very limited on an international level. A recently launched project tries to overcome these limitations by improving access to Business Censuses from multiple countries based on synthetic data. Starting from the synthetic version of the longitudinally edited version of the U.S. Business Register (the Longitudinal Business Database, LBD), the idea is to create similar data products in other countries by applying the synthesis methodology developed for the LBD to generate synthetic replicates that could be distributed without confidentiality concerns. In this paper we present some first results of this project based on German business data collected at the Institute for Employment Research.