Digitalization and Resilience: Data Assets and Firm Productivity Growth During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Heli Koski and Paolo Fornaro

No 113, ETLA Working Papers from The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy

Abstract: Abstract This study investigates the impact of firm-level investments in data assets on productivity growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, utilizing matched employer-employee data of 13,609 Finnish firms for 2015–2020. Our estimation results indicate that firms with greater pre-pandemic investments in software and database assets and ICT experienced significantly higher labor productivity growth in the first year of the pandemic. Notably, these positive effects are predominantly observed in the service sector, while manufacturing companies did not exhibit statistically significant impacts. Furthermore, our analysis highlights that large service companies with greater investments in data assets demonstrated higher labor productivity growth than their counterparts. We also identify a noteworthy complementarity between a firm’s investments in ICT and databases and employees’ skills, as measured by education level. Interestingly, our empirical findings underscore that firms investing more in data, databases and ICT were statistically significantly more likely to belong to the productivity frontier of their industry.

Keywords: Data assets; Digitalization; Productivity; Growth; Resilience; Pandemics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 L25 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2024-01-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ict, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.etla.fi/wp-content/uploads/ETLA-Working-Papers-113.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rif:wpaper:113

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.etla.fi/ ... e-covid-19-pandemic/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ETLA Working Papers from The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kaija Hyvönen-Rajecki ().