Linked Employer-Employee Data from XING and the Mannheim Enterprise Panel

The availability of social media data is growing and represents a new data source for economic research. This paper presents a detailed study on the use of data from a career-oriented social networking platform. The employment data are exported from user profiles and linked to the Mannheim Enterprise Panel (MUP). The linked employer–employee (LEE) data consist of 14 million employments for 1.5 million employers and describes around 9 million employee flows. Plausibility checks confirm that career-oriented social networking data contain valuable information about employments and employee flows. Using such platform data provides opportunities for research on employee mobility, networks, and local ecosystems’ role in economic performance at the employer and the regional level.

Breithaupt, Patrick, Hanna Hottenrott, Christian Rammer und Konstantin Römer (2024), Linked Employer-Employee Data from XING and the Mannheim Enterprise Panel, Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik)