Special Sworn Researcher Program
No, researchers allowed to access microdata through BEA's Special Sworn Research Program are responsible for creating their own data panels.
Survey questions may be added or dropped over time to better meet data users’ needs or to reduce the burden on survey respondents. The utility of survey questions, feedback from data users, and the burden on survey respondents are all considered in the survey question planning process.
Responses to BEA surveys are legally mandatory.
Yes, BEA surveys collect Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) and some surveys collect Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs). Please see Crosswalks Involving BEA Microdata for more information.
Yes, but researchers must create or provide their own ID bridges to those data sets and must have access to those data sets, usually through their home academic institutions. BEA business confidential data accessed through the Special Sworn Researcher Program cannot be commingled with databases that contain company-specific information if the resulting combined data set would contain information beyond the scope of the data items collected in BEA's surveys.
Yes, but research proposals must be approved by both BEA and the other agencies. The agencies must also have an interagency agreement with BEA and the other involved agencies to allow for disclosure review by all agencies of project output. In addition, BEA and other agencies do not use common identifiers, so staff of BEA and those other agencies must use existing crosswalks or prepare crosswalks between their surveys.
U.S. business entities in BEA's survey universe are fully consolidated domestic business enterprises, like the business entities reported on the Census Bureau’s Company Organization Survey.
Yes, but the co-authors are not allowed to see the BEA micro-data or research output that has not been cleared by BEA.
The researcher is responsible for following disclosure avoidance methods and supporting their disclosure request with the necessary supporting information, as described in our disclosure analysis methods and procedures, before submitting their output for disclosure review by BEA.
If you are approved for access to BEA data at an FSRDC, you will be charged a flat fee for each year of FSRDC access. The purpose of this fee is to help offset BEA's costs of participating in the FSRDC program. Because the fee will be assessed by project, it can be shared by the team members on projects involving more than one researcher.