Description:
KombiFiD is an acronym that stands for Kombinierte
Firmendaten für Deutschland. The project is financially supported by the German
Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). It is a joint project of the Institute of
Economics of Leuphana University Lueneburg, the research data centres of the German
Federal Statistical Office and the statistical offices of the German federal states,
the Institute of Employment Research of the Federal Employment Agency and the
research department of the German Central Bank.
The aim of the KombiFiD project is to link firm level data that are collected or
prepared by different institutions for the first time in Germany. Linking these
confidential firm level data across the borders of the data producers is technically
not easy and it is legal only if the firm agreed in written form. The basic idea of
the project KombiFiD is to ask a large sample of firms from all parts of the economy
to agree to match confidential micro data for these firms from three data producers
(the Statistical Offices, the Federal Employment Agency, and the German Central Bank)
in one data set. These matched data are made available for scientific research while
strictly obeying the data protection law, i.e. without revealing micro level
information to researchers outside the data producing agencies. The papers describe
the project in detail, inform how to access the data and discuss the quality of the
linked data.
