The advent of cloud computing promises to improve the way firms utilize IT solutions. Firms are expected to replace large and inflexible fixed-cost investments in IT with more targeted variable spending in cloud solutions. In addition, cloud usage is expected to increase the productivity of...

This paper studies how information and communication technology (ICT) affects the firm geographic organization and its implications on aggregate efficiency. ICT can widen firms' geographic span of control by reducing their internal communication costs. Empirical evidence from confidential US...

Firms in developed countries face increasing shortages of young workers. This paper studies the importance of young workers, particularly vocational trainees, for firm technology investments. Leveraging exogenous variation in trainee supply caused by an education reform in Germany in 2001, I...

We investigate the impact of investment in automation-related goods on adopting and non-adopting firms in the Italian economy during 2011-2019. We integrate datasets on trade activities, firms', and workers' characteristics for the population of Italian importing firms and estimate the effects...

We study whether technology gains in sectors related to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) increase productivity in the rest of the economy. To separate exogenous gains in ICT from other technological progress, we use the relative price of ICT goods and services in a structural VAR...

Due to the COVID-19 crisis and the related "social distancing" measures, working from home (WfH) has suddenly become a crucial lever of economic activity. This paper combines survey and administrative data to compute measures for the feasibility of working from home among German employees....

The canonical supply-demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely influential; however, it has faced several important challenges. Several studies show that the standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities of substitution, yields counterintuitive...

I estimate CES aggregate production functions for the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, and Spain using data from the EU KLEMS database. I distinguish between three types of capital: information and communication technologies (ICT), intellectual property (IP) capital, and traditional capital. I assume...

In a neoclassical economy with endogenous capital- and labor-augmenting technical change the steady-state growth rate of output per worker is shown to increase in the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This confirms the assessment of Klump and de La Grandville (2000) that the...

The transition from traditional labor intensive to modern capital intensive production is a key factor for industrial development. Using half a million observations from Indian manufacturing plants, I analyze the effects of a secular decrease in industrial electricity prices through the lens of...