Technology and Resilience

Xavier Cirera, Diego Comin, Marcio Cruz, Kyungmin Lee and Jesica Torres Coronado

No 9949, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of technology sophistication pre-COVID-19 on the performance of firms during the early stages of the pandemic. It exploits a unique data set covering firms from Brazil, Senegal, and Vietnam, using a treatment effect mediation framework to decompose the results into direct and indirect effects. Increasing pre-pandemic technology sophistication by one standard deviation is associated with 3.8 percentage points higher sales. Both effects are positive, but the direct effect is about five times larger than the indirect effect. The total effect on sales is markedly nonlinear with significantly smaller estimates of the reduction in sales for firms with more sophisticated pre-pandemic technology. The results are robust to different measures of digital responses and matching estimators.

Keywords: Common Carriers Industry; Food & Beverage Industry; Business Cycles and Stabilization Policies; General Manufacturing; Textiles; Apparel & Leather Industry; Pulp & Paper Industry; Construction Industry; Plastics & Rubber Industry; Urban Transport; Financial Sector Policy; Food Security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Technology and Resilience (2022)
Working Paper: Technology and Resilience (2022)
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