This paper analyzes the impact of the decision to contract ICT consulting on firms' innovative incentives. The paper develops a theoretical model and estimates some of its implications for a sample of German firms. In particular, the paper estimates the average treatment effect of the decision...

Firm heterogeneity explains the productivity driven selection mechanism that determines aggregate productivity growth within industries. This paper empirically demonstrates that ICT has a robust impact on firm heterogeneity only when ICT is used intensively and jointly with specific ICT...

Does access to information and communication technologies (ICT) increase innovation? We examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of BITNET across U.S. universities in the 1980s. BITNET, an early version of the Internet, enabled e-mail-based knowledge exchange and collaboration...

The rapid diffusion of open source software (OSS), the significant investments observed in OSS projects, and the new inter-firm collaborative possibilities enabled by such OSS projects have generated a substantial literature on the economics of OSS development. However, this literature mainly...

This paper studies the impact of the adoption of ICT on the economic performance at the firm level, considering explicitly the interaction of adopting firms within the intermediate input market in Germany. The paper identifies and quantifies the importance of adoption externalities and knowledge...

Using panel data for German and Dutch firms from the services sector, this paper analyses the importance of ICT capital deepening and innovation for productivity. We employ a model that takes into account that innovation and ICT use may be complementary. The results show that the contribution of...