Technology and Resilience
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...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2022
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/564491646164406318/Technology-and-Resilience http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37052 |
| Summary: | 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. |
|---|