Comin, Diego
[Verfasser:in];
Cruz, Marcio José Vargas da
[Verfasser:in];
Cirera, Xavier
[Verfasser:in];
Lee, Kyung Min
[Verfasser:in];
Torres, Jesica
[Verfasser:in]
;
National Bureau of Economic Research
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Beschreibung:
This paper estimates the impact of technology sophistication pre-COVID-19 on the performance of firms during the early stages of the pandemic. We exploit a unique data covering firms from Brazil, Senegal, and Vietnam using a treatment effect mediation framework to decompose the results into a direct and an indirect effect. Increasing pre-pandemic technology sophistication by one standard deviation is associated with 3.8pp higher sales. Both effects are positive, but the direct effect is about 5 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. Our results are robust to different measures of digital responses and matching estimators