In response to strong revenue and income losses that a large share of the self-employed faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the...

The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked hope that firm digitalisation will result in long-lasting reductions in mobility and related carbon missions via the use of working from home and online services. In this study, we quantify the extent to which firm digitalisation can be associated with changes...

Our paper contributes to the discussion about Europe's digital sovereignty. We analyze the relationship between firm performance and the diversification of sourcing countries for imported ICT goods. The analysis is based on administrative data for 3888 German manufacturing firms that imported...

Using a unique German firm-level data set, we provide empirical evidence for a productivity sorting along two dimensions: international activity and technology choice. We consider domestic and exporting firms and measure technology choice by firms' actual use of advanced information technology...

In this paper we analyze the impact of information technology and organizational changes on wages using individual level data for 1998/1999. The average impact of IT use on wages turns out to be five to six percent, however, the effects differ across different IT components. Unless employees use...

We implement an endogeneous switching-regression model for labour productivity and firms' decision to use business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Our approach allows B2B usage to affect any parameter of the labour productivity equation and to properly take account of strategic complementarities...

This paper analyzes the relationship between investment in information and communication technologies (ICT), non-ICT-investment, labor productivity and workplace reorganization. Firms are assumed to reorganize workplaces if the productivity gains arising from workplace reorganization exceed the...

Although in its infancy, one promising application of Internet technology for firms is so-called Internet commerce or electronic commerce. This paper analyses the determinants of B2B (business-to-business) adoption borrowing from the literature on the adoption of new technologies and considering...

Ein Berater erfüllt einerseits die Rolle des Wissensvermittlers, andererseits kann er die Funktion übernehmen, bestehende Probleme und geplante Maßnahmen verschiedenen Interessensgruppen gegenüber zu legitimeren. Dieser Artikel zeigt empirische Evidenz für die Rolle des IT-Beraters auf...

The paper provides empirical evidence for the question whether firms' ITenabled labour productivity is affected by the age structure of the workforce. We apply a production function approach with heterogenous labour to firmlevel data from German manufacturing and services industries. We find...