Purpose This study is an exploration of areas pertaining to the use of production data in non-production environments. During the software development life cycle, non-production environments are used to serve various purposes to include unit, component, integration, system, user acceptance,...

Summary Economic researchers often consider quotients like R&D investment divided by sales which could be used to measure "research intensity" of firms if available. However, data on research in particular are highly confidential and would not be released in original form. Therefore scientific...

Economic researchers often consider quotients like R&D investment divided by sales which could be used to measure “research intensity” of firms if available. However, data on research in particular are highly confidential and would not be released in original form. Therefore scientific use...

This study discusses a new procedure for masking confidential numerical data--a procedure called data shuffling--in which the values of the confidential variables are "shuffled" among observations. The shuffled data provides a high level of data utility and minimizes the risk of disclosure. From...

Summary Data collecting institutions use a large range of masking procedures in order to protect data against disclosure. Generally, a masking procedure can be regarded as a kind of data filter that transforms the true data generating process. Such a transformation severely affects the quality...

Data collecting institutions use a large range of masking procedures in order to protect data against disclosure. Generally, a masking procedure can be regarded as a kind of data filter that transforms the true data generating process. Such a transformation severely affects the quality of the...