Welcome to our English homepage about the IAB Establishment Panel. On this page you will find a general description of the IAB Establishment Panel, contact information, selected publications based on the IAB Establishment Panel as well as information on data access for researchers.
Information for participating establishments is available in German at https://iab.de/das-iab/befragungen/iab-betriebspanel/.
Overview
The IAB Establishment Panel is a nationally representative survey of employers and is based on a stratified random sample of the population of all establishments with at least one employee who is subject to social insurance contributions.
Roughly 15,000 establishments are surveyed every year. Interviews are conducted face-to-face, online or by telephone. The IAB Establishment Panel is a longitudinal survey, enabling the observation of key topics over multiple years.
The questionnaire covers as main topics employment development, business policy and development, investments and innovations, personnel structure, personnel movements incl. recruitment, vocational training, further training, working hours, wages and salaries as well as general information about the company. In each year, the questionnaire also includes additional topics, such as the use of robots.
This survey not only provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current situation but also captures the future expectations of the participating establishments.
The IAB Establishment Panel is the basis for the LIAB, which is based on a link with administrative data on establishments and workers, as well as the LPP, which adds further survey information on establishments and workers as well as administrative data on workers.
Methodological foundations of the survey
The article “The IAB Establishment Panel—Methodological Essentials and Data Quality” by Ellguth et al. (2014) describes the sample design, fieldwork procedures, and changes over time.
Selected publications using the IAB Establishment Panel
Benjamin Lochner; Bastian Schulz (2024): Firm Productivity, Wages, and Sorting. In: Journal of labor economics 42, 1, 85-119.
Florian Zimmermann; Matthias Collischon (2023): Do Organizational Policies Narrow Gender Inequality? Novel Evidence from Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data. In: Sociological Science 10, 47-81.
Stephanie Funk (2024): Does being a leader make them stay? Short- and long-term effects of supervisory responsibility on turnover intentions. In: Human resource management journal 35, 1, 25-44.
Uwe Neumann (2024): Temporary agency employment: A supplement to regular jobs – under certain circumstances. In: Competition and Change 28, 2, 359-378.
Data access and further information on the available datesets
External researchers and academic institutions can apply for access through various controlled channels offered by the Research Data Centre (FDZ).
Further information on the available datasets is available on the homepage of the FDZ. These include detailed dataset descriptions, a comprehensive list of variables for each survey wave and the questionnaires.
Contact
Do you have any questions about the IAB Establishment Panel? You can reach out to us at:
IAB-Betriebspanel@iab.de