Until today, the question of how digitalisation and, in particular, individual digital technologies affect productivity is still the subject of controversial debate. Using administrative firm-level data provided by the Dutch and the German statistical offices, we investigate the economic...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often regarded as the next general-purpose technology with a rapid, penetrating, and far-reaching use over a broad number of industrial sectors. A main feature of new general-purpose technology is to enable new ways of production that may increase productivity. So...

In this paper we explore the relationship between innovative firms that patent technology related to Industry 4.0 and their economic performance. By applying the new patent cartography developed by the EPO that identifies firm's 4.0 patents, this is one of the first large-scale, systematic...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a set of techniques that enable new ways of innovation and allows firms to offer new features of products and services, to improve production, marketing and administration processes, and to introduce new business models. This paper analyses the extent to...

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...

Despite the importance of business creation for the economy and a relevant share of new firms being started out of unemployment, most research has focused on analyzing the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) policies on reemployment outcomes that ignore self-employment. In this paper, we...

We analyze gender discrimination in entrepreneurship finance. Access to finance is crucial for entrepreneurial success, yet constraints for women are particularly pronounced. We structurally unpack whether loan officers evaluate business ideas and implementation constraints differently for male...

Business creation is economically important, and unemployment precedes the creation of a substantial share of new firms. Yet, most research has focused on analyzing the effects of unemployment insurance policies on re-employment outcomes, ignoring self-employment. In this paper, we analyze how...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether the impacts of real exchange rate undervaluation and domestic technological capabilities on growth are stable across development levels. On the one hand, a real exchange undervaluation measure is constructed based on the purchasing-power-parity theory...

We analyze the long-run growth effects of automation in the canonical overlapping generations framework. While automation implies constant returns to capital within this model class (even in the absence of technological progress), we show that it does not have the potential to lead to positive...