Empirical Studies with Micro-Data from Official Statistics in Germany

For twenty years the Statistical Offices in Germany have provided access to confidential micro-data on individuals and firms in their Research Data Centers (RDC). These data are extensively used by the scientific community for empirical studies in a wide variety of fields. The four papers in this special issue of the Journal of Economics and Statistics apply micro-data from official statistics.

Fauth et al. (2023) use a novel database with information on the value of exports and imports by firm, country, product, and year for the period 2011–2019 to investigate how German firms fare by looking at the joint distribution of the number of products they trade and the number of countries they trade with. In addition, they examine the importance of firms that are primarily engaged in trade intermediation, as opposed to production. They provide a rich description of the heterogeneity among German firms by decomposing their trade relationships into intensive margins (value of trade) and extensive margins (number of firms, products, and countries). Finally, they show strong positive correlations between and within importing and exporting margins, supporting the existence of firm-level complementarities implied by recent theory. The data used in this paper are available for the first time in the RDC and will provide a solid basis for many further investigations of the international activities of German firms.

Emmenegger and Münnich (2023) address the problem that poor coverage of top income earners in surveys (the so-called “missing rich” problem) leads to a severe underestimation of income inequality. They point out that this shortcoming is even more important at the regional level due to small regional samples. As a solution, top-income correction approaches tackle the missing rich problem by imputing top incomes from tax to survey data. The authors apply a novel approach to impute top incomes in the German Microcensus survey data based on region-specific Pareto and Generalized Pareto distributions estimated from tax records and provide new estimates of regional income inequality in Germany. Thus, the paper is an important contribution to the research on income inequality in Germany.

The contribution of von Graevenitz and Rottner (2023) examines the pattern of energy use in German manufacturing using the modules on plant-level production, energy use, and firm-level cost structure modules of the German production census AFiD for the period from 2003 to 2017. Their analysis shows that while manufacturing firms face rising energy costs as a share of total costs, energy use has not declined. However, energy intensity, and especially carbon intensity has declined over the period under study. They show that these developments can be explained by changes in the fuel mix in the manufacturing sector, with gas and self-generated electricity becoming increasingly important. The paper is an important and timely contribution to the climate change literature, as the manufacturing sector accounts for a large share of carbon emissions. Understanding the evolution of energy use patterns in this sector is, therefore, crucial for climate policy.

Dütsch et al. (2023) apply data from the Structure of Earnings Surveys 2014 and 2018 to investigate structural shifts in low-wage employment around the introduction and first increase of the German minimum wage. The authors characterize low-wage employment relationships based on worker and employer characteristics and ask whether these patterns changed after the introduction of the mandatory minimum wage. In particular, they study whether employment effects generated compositional adjustments in the low-wage sector in terms of worker and employer characteristics between 2014 and 2018. The study shows that the low-wage risk declined among women, part-time and marginal workers. Also, the authors argue that the minimum wage legislation was associated with a convergence between employers since smaller, northeastern German, and service sector employers now have a reduced excess risk of low-wage employment.