Social scientists increasingly expect to have access to detailed data for research purposes. As the level of detail increases, data providers worry about "spontaneous recognition", the likelihood that a microdata user believes that he or she has accidentally identified one of the data subjects...

Traditional literature on sampling techniques focuses mainly on statistical samples and covers non-random (non-statistical) samples only marginally. Nevertheless, there has been a recent revival of interest in non-statistical samples, given their widespread use in certain fields like government...

Analysis of consolidated accounting data of European listed groups shows significant differences in some key ratios between countries. However, the figures do not reveal whether these differences result from a distinct composition of the countries’ populations in terms of branches of activity...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

The Bank for the Accounts of Companies Harmonized (BACH) is a free-of-charge database containing the aggregated accounting data of non-financial incorporated enterprises for, so far, 11 European countries. While the individual accounts feeding the database were originally prepared in line with...

Cash pooling is a bank service that allows corporates to externalise the intra-group cash management, and thus manage their global liquidity effectively with lower costs. Although there is little quantitative information on the significance of the phenomenon, cash pooling appears to have become...