**2. Data and Methods**

The data which the results are based on were acquired from the Amadeus database (hosting the data of the 565,000 largest public and private companies in 43 European countries) with a query (Applied industry classification code "3511", "production of electricity" in NACE Rev. 2 based classification system) with the following conditions: "active and not bankrupt"; "operating in Germany"; "generating electricity in the RE industry (solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal)"; "no conventional electricity production"; "not publicly listed". The query returned data for 783 electricity-producing companies with financial accounts available for the period of 2010–2018. The sampling period was chosen based on the availability of the data and the fact that the FIT-support was active during the years of the sampling period for all RE technologies studied in this paper.

The retrieved data were sorted by name and "trade description" according to the activity of generating or transmitting renewable electricity from any RE source. The data include companies in all the above-mentioned RE sectors except for geothermal power and some of the firms are active with multiple RE technologies.

Company-specific data were combined with data on feed-in tariffs and energy statistics. Data on feed-in tariffs and the industry and energy statistics for the nine years in question were obtained from the European Commission's Eurostat statistics database [35], the World Bank database [36], and the OECD [37] databases.

Company size was used to classify the companies into two cohorts, for which analysis was performed separately; the cohorts were constructed by combining the companies in the Amadeus size categories "very large" and "large" into one cohort (*n* = 401) and companies in categories "medium" and "small" into another (*n* = 332), see Table 2 for information about these categories. The decision was made to study the possible difference between SMEs and large firms. That is, the category "Very Large" was excluded from the study, representing a minor share of the overall data when taking into account the number of companies (9/733 companies = 1.2%). Although the cohort of large companies is larger, in the analysis used, the observations of the large companies are significantly lower than with the SMEs and stay at around 100 observations due to the unbalanced panel.

**Table 2.** Company size categories and the resulting number of firms in the analyzed data. Size categories adopted from Amadeus.

