The project sets out a monitoring and data collection exercise for cross-border company mobility within the EU. The monitoring will include:
- European company law forms (SE and SCE);
- Cross-border company mobility instruments (cross-border mergers, divisions and cross-border conversions).
For cases in which one of these cross-border instruments is applied, a number of additional information is collected, which are necessary for accurately describing the transaction and the companies (or company in the case of a seat transfer or SE) involved. The project is carried out for companies registered in the European Economic Area and on a continuous basis from 2017 onwards.
To obtain the necessary data, the methodology focuses on the monitoring of the company registries and the official journals of the EU/EEA countries. This methodology is chosen for the reason that cross-border mergers, divisions, cross-border conversions, formations of European company law forms and similar measures must be published in (at least one) national official journal.
All cross-border transactions are subsequently checked via company databases for the relevant information on the companies as well as potential employee participation issues. After the required data is acquired based on the above-mentioned databases for the identified companies, transactions will be identified which had an effect on employee participation.
The data is collected by the Erasmus University Rotterdam and its network of researchers and experts for the European Trade Union Institute. This includes information on the effect of such cross-border company mobility cases on employee participation as well as general information on the companies concerned.
The transaction data are stored in a FAIR database, designed by the project’s data architect Pedro Hernandez Serrano for data aggregation and analysis. The data extraction pipeline is schematically outlined below.
