Seminar - Mercedes Teruel Carrizosa

Mercedes Teruel Carrizosa (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) will present her paper “Digitalisation in firms: An analysis of determinants and outcomes of European high-growth enterprises ", joint work with Peter Bauer (Joint Research Centre – European Comission Belgium), Alex Coad (Waseda Business School), Clemens Domnick (Joint Research Centre – European Comission Spain), Peter Harasztosi, Desirée Rückert and Christoph Weiss (European Investment Bank). 

Abstract

Digitalisation is transforming firm behaviour and fosters the appearance of scale-ups. This paper analyses if high-growth enterprises (HGEs) invest and adopt more digital technologies, and if the digitalisation process increases firm growth. We use the European Investment Bank Investment Survey for 27 EU Member States. Using a wide range of variables, we capture multiple dimensions of the digitalisation process. First, our results suggest that there are complementarities between investment in software and data and new digital technologies (NDTs). Second, firms that adopt NDTs are more likely to present rapid sales growth, while non-significant effects are perceived in employment, productivity and salary. Furthermore, during COVID-19 period HGEs expected to grow more the number of employees in the future thanks to investment in NDTs. Finally, our results suggest that base technologies exert a medium-term effect on employment growth while front-end technologies are associated with a short rapid sales growth