Disclosure risk for firms in combined firm-datasets

Patrick Breithaupt and Sandra Gottschalk

No 25-036, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Past studies have successfully shown that the level of anonymisation of scientific use files (SUF) is sufficiently high to protect against disclosure attacks that use data from traditional firm databases. However, with the increasing availability of online data about firms, new challenges for the provision of SUFs arise. In this paper, we therefore focus on a scenario, where an attack against the Mannheim Innovation Panel SUF is performed using data from the Mannheim Enterprise Panel and Mannheim Web Panel. We find that the disclosure risk of our attack is small and increases only slightly if data from the Mannheim Web Panel are considered. Data protection officers may use our findings when researchers want to publish SUFs.

Keywords: matching; firms; text as data; scientific use files (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 C61 C8 L00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sbm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:321871

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