Study title

The German Business Panel (GBP) is a data infrastructure that periodically surveys executives and key decision-makers in a representative sample of German firms, eliciting their perceptions, views, and expectations. The primary objective of the longitudinal panel study is to generate evidence on the role of accounting and tax regulation for companies. It is part of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB/TRR) Project-ID 403041268 – TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency. The 2020 GBP Covid-19 Survey focusses on the impact of the health crisis on firm´s key outcomes like revenues, profits, as well as perceptions, responses, and plans of decision makers. Questions elicit manager and firm characteristics, as well as perceptions on economic uncertainty, firm survival, government economic policy, take-up of government support, and managerial strategies to responds to the crisis as well as future investment and employment plans. The questionnaire includes various instruments with experimental variation. More information is available at gbpanel.org. The 2020 GBP Covid-19 Survey was conducted from July-October 2020 and from November-February 2021 on a rolling basis among a representative sample of decision makers of legally independent private and public businesses with economic activity in the Federal Republic of Germany. For each of the two survey periods, the sampling involved a two-stage procedure. First, a simple random sample was drawn, which was then in a second step randomly allocated according to a contact protocol to generate a rolling cross-section. The two rolling cross-sections together form a rolling panel. The survey was conducted by the German Business Panel team, Mannheim. Interviews were conducted using online computer-assisted web interviewing (CAWI). Parts of the interviews involved computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI).Wave 1: Legal form of the company; annual sales in 2019 (open, categorized); number of employees subject to social security...