New digital technologies and firm performance in the Italian economy
基于意大利企业微观数据，采用双重差分法分析工业4.0相关新技术对劳动生产率、平均工资和销售增长的影响，发现对生产率和销售的促进效果约为工资的两倍，且中小企业受益更大。
New digital technologies can generate substantial gains for adopting businesses. In this paper we analyse the impact of new technologies associated with the Industry 4.0 paradigm on labour productivity, average wages and sales growth. The analysis is based on microdata produced by the Italian National Institute for the Analysis of Public Policies (INAPP) on a large representative sample of Italian firms. We merge INAPP data with Orbis data covering the period 2010–2014-2018. By applying a Diff-in-Diff methodology, we show that the economic size of the effect of new technologies on productivity and sales is approximately twice as large as the effect on average wages. The positive impact is stronger for small and medium-size firms, even though the effects appear to be concentrated among more mature rather than younger firms and are heterogeneaous along the distributions. Results are robust to unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity issues.