Education Use Files

Contrary to the Scientific Use Files, the ZEW Education Use Files are absolutely anonymized. It is thus definitely impossible to track back individual information on the participants of a certain survey. ZEW offers Education Use Files of the Mannheim Innovation Panel (MIP) from the survey years 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2009, and 2011. This data is designed for use in teaching at higher education establishments in order to introduce and convey application possibilities of econometric analysis for business data in the context of questions relating to the economics of innovation. The interpretation of the content is, however, limited and thus not suited to answer research questions.

To guarantee full anonymity, different anonymization methods are used radically changing original data. The Education Use File of the MIP represents a resample of the corresponding Scientific Use Files, which has already passed the first step of anonymization. In the resample, the individual data of the metric variables in a data set are draws from the kernel density distribution of the original data and do not correspond with the true statements. The observations cannot be clearly assigned to a specific company. The micro data to be analysed form the basis for generating synthetic statistical units. The artificial data is supposed to carry the same characteristics, i.e. the same multivariate distribution function, as the original micro data. The basic philosophy is to create data sets that are suitable for all kinds of purposes. On the one hand, the passing on of artificial data does not endanger data privacy as no real observations are provided. On the other hand, there is no information loss as long as the given data reflects all distribution parameters of the regarded micro data. (For a detailed description of the procedure, see Gottschalk, S. Unternehmensdaten zwischen Datenschutz and Analysepotenzial, Baden-Baden, 2005. Upon request, a description is also available directly from the author).