Zusammenfassung:
With the world-wide spread of the internet in the 1990s, the conduction of web or e-mailsurveys became popular in research. Although these surveys provide fast data collectionand reduced costs, results may suffer from biases due to the survey mode. While a varietyof studies concerning mode effects in household or individual surveys exists, only lessis known in case of business surveys. To give a contribution to this topic, we analyse alarge German business survey the Ifo Business Survey which is answered by about7,000 respondents each month since 1949. In this paper, we focus on three differentaspects with respect to the survey mode: data quality, respondents' profiles and responsebehavior. Our results show that e-mail or web surveys reduce nonresponse and are morelikely used by larger firms which operate in technology-related business areas.