The Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the Federal Employment Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg provides remote access to confidential micro data for the German labor market.
Data available at the FDZ stems either from social security notifications, administrative processes of the BA or from surveys conducted by IAB. Currently, 10 data products covering various aspects of the labor market are available at the FDZ. The Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies (SIAB), for example, is a random sample on 2% of all individuals in Germany which are characterized either by employment subject to social security, unemployment benefit receipt, participation in labor market programs or registered job search. Information on establishments is provided by the IAB Establishment Panel or the Establishment History Panel (BHP). The IAB Establishment Panel is an annual representative survey on various topics such as the determinants of labor demand, whereas the BHP contains all establishments in Germany with at least one employee liable to social security on June 30. A unique source for the simultaneous analysis of the demand and supply side of the labor market are the Linked Employer-Employee (LIAB) data. For this purpose the IAB Establishment Panel data are matched with individual data generated in labor administration and social security data processing. New developments like geocoding or links to other data sets (for example German Patent data) will expand the data landscape in the near future.
English documentation and working tools like frequency counts and test data are available for nearly all datasets. Depending on the degree of anonymization, access for FDZ data is provided off- or on-site and is free of charge. Data users can access FDZ in Germany data from the research data centers of the statistical offices of the Länder at their sites in Berlin, Bremen, Düsseldorf and Dresden, and at the University of Applied Labor Studies of the German Federal Employment Agency in Mannheim. Additionally, this possibility also exists at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA. More sites are on the way (France, The Netherlands, UK and US).