EIB Group Survey on Investment and Investment Finance: A technical note on data quality

This paper reviews the data quality of the EIB Group Survey on Investment and Investment Finance (EIBIS). It finds that the chosen sampling framework (the Bureau van Dijk ORBIS database) captures the business population of interest well and that there is little evidence ofselection bias during fieldwork, suggesting that EIBIS is a reliable data source to study the corporate investment situation in the EU. This result is predicated on the following observations: 1) the ORBIS database has sufficient coverage relative to the actual population; 2) a benchmarking exercise of the final survey sample against randomly drawn samples from the sampling frame shows there is no systematic sampling bias in EIBIS. Efforts to create firm panel do not jeopardize randomness. 3) A comparison of the final sample with two other databases: the Eurostat Structural Business Statistics as well as the CompNet database shows that EIBIS portrays both cross-country differences and dynamics of key variables in a satisfactory way.