Matching UK Business Microdata – A Study Using ONS and CBI Business Surveys

Michael J Mahony and Josh Martin ()

No ESCOE-TR-14, Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) Technical Reports from Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE)

Abstract: Business data linkage is a powerful tool to unlock new insights, that are often not possible using data from one source alone. However, it can be challenging and often requires a number of decisions to be made on how the linking should be conducted. Such decisions can affect the match rates and conclusions drawn from the linked data. To provide some useful information to researchers on the common pitfalls when doing data linkage, and some potential solutions, we provide an account of a business data linkage exercise. We link three sources: a survey of businesses conducted by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the FAME dataset of business financial data from Bureau van Dijk, and the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR). This requires the use of business names and addresses as linking 'keys' which are subject to error and imprecision, resulting in less than complete matches. We detail a novel solution to choose among ‘multiple matches’ when a propensity-score matching approach is unable to select a definitive match, which we implemented when linking the CBI data with the IDBR. We report match results, which are around 50 per cent when linking the CBI survey with FAME, and around 90 per cent when linking the CBI survey with IDBR. We also report variation by geography, size and time-period. We then use the IDBR-linked CBI data to match on data from various ONS business surveys, which typically have match rates of less than 50 per cent, and in some cases far lower. We conclude with some recommendations for researchers when conducting data linkage.

Keywords: business surveys; data linkage; microdata analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 C81 C89 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://escoe-website.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/ ... 4535/ESCoE-TR-14.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nsr:escoet:escoe-tr-14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) Technical Reports from Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) King's College London Strand London WC2R 2LS. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ESCoE Centre Manager ().