Firm Productivity and Learning with Digital Technologies: Evidence from Cloud Computing
James M. Brand,
Mert Demirer,
Connor Finucane and
Avner Kreps
No 32938, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
We study firm productivity and learning in cloud computing by leveraging CPU utilization data from over one billion virtual machines used by nearly 100,000 firms. We find large and persistent dispersion in firms’ productivity with cloud computing, similar to canonical results in the literature. More productive firms respond better to demand fluctuations, show higher attentiveness to resource utilization, and use a wider variety of specialized machines. New-adopters learn to be more productive with the cloud over time, improving 33.0% in their first year, but it takes four years for them to reach a steady state, slower than many previously studied settings. Our results indicate substantial aggregate implications of inefficiencies in computing: improving firm productivity reduces the use of computing resources by up to 35% and electricity by up to 28%.
JEL-codes: D24 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-ict, nep-ipr, nep-sbm and nep-tid
Note: IO PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32938.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
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:nbr:nberwo:32938
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32938
The price is Paper copy available by mail.
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().