The German Business Panel: Firm-Level Data for Accounting and Taxation Research
介绍了德国商业面板（GBP），它通过调查德国企业关键决策者收集会计和税务选择数据，支持随机实验，对研究欧洲中小企业会计问题有用，并展示了疫情期间政府援助和增值税减免的效果。
The German Business Panel (GBP) periodically surveys key decision-makers via a large sample of companies in Germany. The survey questions investigate managers’ accounting and taxation choices as well as the expected and perceived outcomes of those decisions. To obtain causal evidence, the survey supports the use of randomized survey experiments. The evidence from the GBP can meaningfully advance our understanding of issues that require data on internal processes as well as expectations, perceptions, and objectives behind ex-post reported accounting figures. The target population comprises the universe of legal entities included in the official German Statistical Business Register. We show that the dominance of small and medium-sized entities is a feature that Germany shares with many European countries, implying that GBP findings will be reasonably generalizable to European settings. We illustrate the usefulness of GBP data by presenting evidence from the initial waves of the GBP during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show how government aid programs contributed unevenly to the solvency of the most negatively affected companies, and how companies, rather than consumers, benefited from a temporary reduction of VAT rates. The paper also demonstrates how the scientific community can use the GBP data.