Abstract The Socio-Economic Panel Linked Employer–Employee Survey, Version 2 (SOEP-LEE2), provides linked information on employees, establishments, and self-employed individuals in Germany. An earlier Data Observer article (Matiaske, Wenzel, Torben Dall Schmidt, Christoph Halbmeier, M. Maas, D. Holtmann, C. Schröder, et al. 2024. “SOEP-LEE2: Linking Surveys on Employees to Employers in Germany.” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 244 (5–6): 671–84) introduces the study design and presents results from the first data wave. Since then, the project has substantially expanded. The second wave of the employer survey and the second survey of self-employed respondents is now complete, and the comparison establishment survey is finalized. This paper provides an update, as of 2026, on the state of the SOEP-LEE2 data infrastructure, summarizes recent developments, presents key descriptive information on the expanded dataset, and discusses new research opportunities arising from the longitudinal design.
The ifo Business Climate Index for Germany is one of the most widely used leading indicators for the German economy. This paper introduces a new vintage dataset that contains all originally published time series of the ifo Business Climate Index and its components since January 2004. The dataset covers eight sectors - including the aggregate indicators for Overall Economy and Industry and Trade as well as six sectoral indicators - each with three time series for business climate, current business situation, and business expectations. It documents the historical evolution of the index across publication vintages and captures revisions arising from seasonal adjustment and from methodological changes, such as the transition to the X-13ARIMA-SEATS seasonal adjustment method in 2015 and the inclusion of the service sector in 2018. A revision analysis covering the period from April 2018 onward shows that first-release values are highly reliable: mean revisions are close to zero across all series, and the directional signal of the month-on-month change is confirmed by subsequent vintages in more than nine out of 10 months for the headline indicator. The dataset is publicly available at https://www.ifo.de/ifo-zeitreihen and enables a wide range of further research, including real-time forecasting exercises, turning-point analyses, and studies of financial market reactions to initial data releases.
Do public holidays affect economic output? In Germany, strict Sunday trading restrictions create a natural experiment. When public holidays fall on Sundays, they typically do not impose additional constraints on business activity. I exploit this institutional feature to identify the economic cost of a lost workday using variation across states and years. Based on monthly manufacturing data and a stacked event study design, I find that weekday public holidays lead to modest but statistically significant reductions in output. Extrapolating the estimates implies annual GDP losses between 0.055 % and 0.28 %, depending on whether the effect is assumed to apply only to manufacturing or to the entire economy.
This study examines the relationship between countries' compliance with the fiscal rules of the European Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and their national and supranational fiscal frameworks. Using a sample of 27 European Union Member States from 2000 to 2021, we find that well-designed national fiscal targets positively correlate with overall compliance with the SGP's fiscal rules. However, the results also suggest that there may be a substitution or conflict effect between national and supranational governance levels when they interact, which could be explained by mutual interference or the undermining of each other's functions: as supranational constraints tighten, the correlation between national fiscal rules and compliance weakens. Furthermore, independent fiscal institutions (IFIs) with specific institutional characteristics act as moderators when the number of numerical supranational targets is high, improving compliance with fiscal rules. In the context of the new European fiscal framework, our results have critical policy implications, implying the need for a well-designed national fiscal framework in environments with a reduced number of supranational regulations and/or well-equipped IFIs to ensure enhanced compliance with European fiscal rules.
For more than two decades, France has produced macro-fiscal forecasts that have tended to be overly optimistic, despite the fiscal discipline framework imposed by the European Union. This study draws on data from the Stability Programmes between 1998 and 2024 to trace the evolution of macroeconomic and fiscal forecast errors and to assess whether the creation of the French High Council of Public Finance (Haut Conseil des finances publiques, HCFP) in 2013 is associated with improved forecast accuracy. Descriptively, forecast errors, particularly those related to growth, debt, and expenditure, declined markedly after 2013, both in magnitude and direction. An interrupted time-series (ITS) analysis identifies a robust structural break in public expenditure forecast errors around 2013, while growth, revenue, deficit, and debt series do not exhibit statistically significant breaks. To address the concern that the observed improvement could simply reflect France becoming easier to forecast, we complement the ITS with a within-France difference-in-differences (DiD) comparing the French government's Stability Programme errors to forecasts produced by the IMF (World Economic Outlook) and the European Commission (AMECO) for the same target years, using target-year fixed effects to absorb common shocks. The ITS, the forecaster DiD, non-parametric Wilcoxon rank-sum tests, and a permutation-based ITS with randomly assigned break dates converge on a robust improvement for expenditure (of about 0.5 pp), moderate evidence for debt, and no HCFP-specific effect for GDP, revenue, or the fiscal balance. The paper concludes that, despite its merely advisory mandate, the HCFP plausibly contributes to fiscal transparency on the expenditure side, though the magnitude of its disciplining effect remains modest and heterogeneous across fiscal aggregates.
This contribution replicates a key result of Allen, Arkolakis, and Takahashi (AAT, Journal of Political Economy, 2020), who estimate the supply curve in a cross section of countries using the estimated fixed effects of a demand-side gravity model of bilateral trade as dependent variable. The replication of their preferred specification delivers almost identical estimation results. However, AAT do not consider that the dependent variable of the supply function is a vector of estimated parameters, the fixed effects of the demand-side gravity model. The present contribution proposes a two-step estimation approach that takes into account the variation induced by the estimation of the fixed effects in the first step and leads to consistent estimates of the standard errors. Moreover, the estimates of the supply curve parameters turn out as highly sensitive to the specification of the demand-side gravity model, limiting the applicability of AAT's approach.
Due to the relevance of digital technologies for economic prosperity, measuring their adoption is of particular importance. We show that the availability of firm website data and advances in text mining enable the creation of real-time and large-scale estimates for digital technology adoption. In order to learn the abstract definition of digitalisation, we train a random forest regression model on labelled newspaper articles. The trained model is then applied to firms' website content to obtain a firm-level indicator of digitalisation. Plausibility checks confirm the link to established digitalisation indicators at the firm and sectoral level, as well as for firm size classes and regions. Lastly, we illustrate the indicator's validity by analysing the link between digitalisation and firm resilience during the COVID-19 crisis to produce findings that are consistent with the related literature.
We discuss two features of quantitative studies of climate policy that have not received much attention but could considerably affect insights: ex-ante versus ex-post approaches, and heterogeneity of socio-economic and attitudinal characteristics of individuals. The reason to combine them in one study is that the heterogeneous factors seem to differ considerably between ex-ante and ex-post approaches. This might translate in systematic differences in policy insights between the two types of studies. To clarify this issue, we undertake a systematic literature review comparing the studies in terms of topics and socio-economic and attitudinal characteristics covered. Our assessment uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis: the former provides an overview of topics across studies using computational linguistic analysis, while the latter offers detailed insights into heterogeneous characteristics and their relationship to study findings. We find that while many studies examine the impact of climate policy on equity, few studies examine the influence of considering heterogeneous individual characteristics on outcomes of evaluating alternative climate policies. Our assessment covers two policy issues, namely public support of climate policy and the impact of such policy on carbon emissions. We show that the two approaches differ systematically in both method use and the policy instruments studied. Overall, integrating both approaches yields a more nuanced understanding of climate policy. Future research, especially ex-ante studies, should examine a broader range of heterogeneous factors and their effects on policy effectiveness and public support.
The recently established link between the Mannheim Enterprise Panel (MUP), developed by the ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, and the administrative establishment information from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) provides a novel opportunity to combine enterprise-level information with establishment-level labour market data. The core MUP-data are originally collected by Creditreform e.V., a credit rating agency that shares the data with the ZEW for quality assurance and economic research purposes. The establishment-level information is derived from social security notifications. Both data sources are highly complete and of high quality. Linking the two data sources provides information on both enterprise and establishment characteristics for the majority of active businesses in terms of employment and finance, across a longitudinal time series. This paper describes the linkage, the cleaning steps, and the final data product, and how it can be accessed.
The intersection of climate econometrics and public health policy faces a persistent infrastructure gap in Germany. While meteorological data are available at high spatial resolution, administrative mortality statistics remain fragmented, siloed by federal state agencies, and often delayed by up to 24 months. This data disconnect hinders the timely empirical evaluation of municipal Hitzeaktionspl & auml;ne (Heat Action Plans) and obfuscates the regional heterogeneity of climate damages. To bridge this gap, this article introduces the GHMP (German Heat-Mortality Panel), a balanced panel dataset covering the 16 Federal States (Bundesl & auml;nder) from 2015 to 2024. By harmonizing official national mortality records from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) with state-specific temperature anomalies from the German Meteorological Service (DWD), a population-weighted imputation algorithm is applied to estimate regional excess mortality correlated with thermal stress. This "synthetic panel" approach provides a robust, open-access proxy for researchers to test difference-in-differences models, benchmark regional climate vulnerability, and teach econometric methods. The dataset reveals a significant North-South thermal gradient, with the state of Saarland consistently exhibiting the highest thermal load and documents a structural break in the thermal baseline beginning in 2022.
The German Heating and Housing Panel (GHHP) provides a new data basis to assess the effectiveness, distributional effects, and public acceptance of climate policy in Germany's building sector. Funded within the Kopernikus project Ariadne, the annual surveys from 2021 to 2023 include about 15,000 households, thereof 65 % owners and 35 % renters. The GHHP gathers detailed information on the building stock, heating systems and costs, energy retrofit measures, and socio-economic characteristics. Recent waves additionally investigate households' experiences during the energy crisis, their expectations regarding future energy prices, intended energy-saving actions, and reflections on heating behavior.
We exploit an incremental retirement age reform to investigate the impact of an increase in the legal retirement age on the benefit-claiming age using administrative data from the German public pension insurance. We synthesize findings from several marginal retirement age increases over 10 birth cohorts with a meta-analytic random effects model and find that compliance with marginal treatment is relatively high, but increases if combined with fewer available pathways into retirement. Female retirees retire later in response to a legal retirement age increase than males.
This study examines the relationship between the onset and progression of a chronic disease and subsequent income and employment trajectories using SHARE-RV, a longitudinal dataset that links survey data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with German Pension Insurance administrative records (RV). This data linkage enables an assessment of the long-term consequences of chronic illness on labour market participation and income development, with observation periods exceeding 20 years. The empirical findings indicate that a chronic disease exhibit negative correlations with employment outcomes and earned income. These adverse effects differ in magnitude depending on the indicator used to define chronic disease and are most pronounced when restricting analyses to severe chronic conditions. Further, notable gender differences are observed. The spectrum of income losses ranges from moderate decreases in earnings points to the complete loss of earned income as a result of unemployment, labour market exit, or transition to disability pension receipt. The analysis also explores the extent to which chronic illness acts to intensify pre-existing labour market inequalities. The results indicate that the employment and income trajectories of highly qualified individuals are substantially less adversely affected by the onset and progression of chronic disease compared to those of individuals with low or medium levels of qualification. Indeed, highly qualified individuals may continue to accrue additional earnings points even following a chronic disease diagnosis. Consequently, chronic illness contributes to the amplification of social inequality within the labor market.
In 2012, 22 EU countries signed the Fiscal Compact, an intergovernmental agreement aimed at backing EU fiscal rules with national arrangements. The main goal of the initiative was to strengthen compliance through an automatic correction mechanism triggering fiscal adjustment in case public finances deviate from 'the path of virtue'. Although the Compact de facto ceased to exist with the 2024 reform of the EU fiscal framework, it still offers useful insights for the future. Our analysis shows that better compliance was associated with a superior design of the correction mechanism, higher government efficiency and a stronger media presence of independent fiscal institutions. Economic growth can make up for a less sophisticated design. We also show that many countries had linked the trigger of the correction mechanism to decisions at the EU level. This choice defeated the original purpose of correction mechanisms to decouple key fiscal policy decisions from political considerations and discretion and bodes ill for 2024 reform of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP).
The Economic Experts Survey (EES) is the most comprehensive global survey of economic experts. Established at the ifo Institute in 2022 as the successor to the World Economic Survey (WES), its aim is to capture experts' assessments of economic policy and political developments in their home countries, as well as their views on topical issues in the economic policy debate. Each quarter, the EES surveys around 10,000 experts across over 120 countries, providing real-time insights into experts' perspectives on current economic policy. In this paper, we present an overview of the EES. We describe the survey's coverage and characteristics of its participants, outline the methodological approach and questionnaire design, and briefly describe research based on EES data. We also explain the opportunities for accessing the EES data.
Since 2016 the Journal of Economics and Statistics publishes the Data Observer section with descriptions of data that can be used in empirical research in economics (and in the social sciences in general), This note gives a short overview of the contributions published in the first 10 yers.
This study investigates the motherhood penalty on personal net wealth and public pension wealth, focusing on women born between 1937 and 1989. Expanding upon previous research, we (a) contrast the impact of motherhood on public pension wealth and net wealth, (b) adopt a dynamic perspective by modelling wealth accumulation over the life course, and (c) differentiate between mothers of one or multiple children. Our sample includes individuals insured in the German public pension system, excluding civil servants and self-employed. We use the SOEP-RV linkage data, combining the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with administrative records from the German Pension Insurance (VSKT), and analyze public pension wealth and individual net wealth for 2002, 2007, 2012 and 2017. Growth curve models reveal a significant motherhood penalty in net wealth, particularly pronounced in West Germany. For public pension wealth, there is a significant penalty in West Germany, while no significant long-term effect is observed in East Germany.
This data report describes the first and second wave of the RWI Climate-Mobility Panel, a recurring household survey that aims in particular to investigate individual mobility behavior and preferences with regard to mobility-related policies. It further includes information on attitudes towards environmental protection and climate change of household members in Germany as well as on socio-economic individual and household characteristics. These first two waves, collected via forsa in 2018 and 2019, each comprise responses from over 6,000 households. These waves enable longitudinal analyses of changes in mobility behavior, policy preferences, and environmental attitudes over time, while also offering rich cross-sectional data on additional transportation-related topics. Further, both waves include an assessment of perceived car use costs and selected psychological scales. This uniquely comprehensive data set serves as a basis for novel research and evidence-based policy decisions in the context of the mobility and transport transition. The panel will be extended with additional survey waves conducted in 2022 and 2024, as well as with planned future data collections.
