ICT Spillovers and Productivity Growth

Abstract:

The overall objective is to improve our understanding of ICT spillovers on productivity growth. Specifically, the wish is to understand: (i) how important ICT spillovers are for productivity growth? And (ii) how distinctive characteristics of ICT can be modeled in a theory-founded econometric framework?The main idea is to develop a counterfactual framework for quantifying ICT spillovers. "Latent" productivity measures will be estimated and compared to actual productivity measures. The advantage of "latent" productivity measures is that real spillovers are isolated from common and idiosyncratic shocks, thereby revealing information on ICT spillovers. Several econometric techniques applied to other fields will be adapted into this study on productivity. An important part of this project is the development of a firm-level dataset for the Danish economy. The high quality of the Danish data allows not only studying the spillover effects but provides important information on other firm characteristics, which may potentially play an important role in influencing TFP. Other firm-level datasets are, for example, the Uni credit dataset for Italy and the ZEW surveys for Germany. For the industry and macro level, the EU KLEMS dataset will be used. It is expected that the results of this project will be published in good international journals. Furthermore, the results will be of direct relevance to policy makers both in national and international political and regulative institutions.