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...

Although information and communication technologies (ICT) consume energy themselves, they are considered to have the potential to reduce overall energy intensity within economic sectors. While previous empirical evidence is based on aggregated data, this is the first large-scale empirical study...

Knowledge-based capital is a key factor for productivity growth. Over the past 15 years, it has been increasingly recognised that knowledge-based capital comprises much more than technological knowledge and that these other components are essential for understanding productivity developments and...

The following paper assesses whether current policy environments are appropriate for the emergence of cloud computing technology. In particular, this research uses firm-level data for Germany and the UK to examine the impact of capital incentive programmes (a common policy present in most OECD...

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...

We examine the link between Internet usage and political ignorance. We construct a novel Index as a direct measure of individuals’ indifference with respect to political issues which determines the degree of individual political ignorance. Our econometric analysis is based on a rich data set...

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...

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...