The global economic situation and need to be better prepared for competitive challenges put pressure on modern companies to shift toward automation and digitalization. As a consequence of rapid technological development and the speed of change and therefore forced transformation of business...

The service sector is undergoing rapid changes attribut- ed to digitalization. This study examines the relation- ship between digitalization and the performance of the Finnish private service firms from 2015 to 2021 using linked employer-employee data, financial data and an IT usage survey. Our...

While past decades were characterized by economic liberalization and deregulation, there re-mains an enduring presence of political influence over the private economy. Such influence can either benefit (e.g. government support addressed at survival and growth prospects) or harm (e.g. reduced...

A growing literature is investigating the nature and size of the disparities in the performance of firms led by men and women. The extant literature in this regard is inconclusive and provides support for both the women's under-performance hypothesis and the superior performance of women-led...

We study the impact of the Brexit referendum on Irish exporters to the UK. The referendum triggered a sharp devaluation of the British pound vis-a-vis the euro and led to considerable uncertainty about future trade relations between the UK and the EU. Using administrative data on the universe of...

This paper exploits time and geographic variation in the adoption of Special Economic Zones in India to assess the direct effects of the program on firm performance. We combine geocoded firm-level data and geocoded SEZs. Our analysis yields that conditional on controlling for initial selection...

Empirical studies find that firms with employee representation have a higher productivity than firms without employee representation. The exact mechanisms for this consistent finding remain unclear, however. A frequent theoretical argument postulates that employee representation provides a...