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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often regarded as the next general-purpose technology with a rapid, penetrating, and far-reaching use over a broad number of industrial sectors. A main feature of new general-purpose technology is to enable new ways of production that may increase productivity. So far, however, only very few studies investigated likely productivity effects of AI at the firm-level; presumably because of lacking data. We exploit unique survey data on firms’ adoption of AI technology and estimate its productivity effects with a sample of German firms. We employ both a cross-sectional dataset and a panel database. To address the potential endogeneity of AI adoption, we also implement IV estimators. We find positive and significant effects of the use of AI on firm productivity. This finding holds for different measures of AI usage, i.e., an indicator variable of AI adoption, and the intensity with which firms use AI methods in their business processes. ispartof: FEB Research Report MSI_2203 pages:1-36 status: published

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often regarded as the next general-purpose technology with a rapid, penetrating, and far-reaching use over a broad number of industrial sectors. A main feature of new general-purpose technology is to enable new ways of production that may increase productivity. So far, however, only very few studies investigated likely productivity effects of AI at the firm-level; presumably because of lacking data. We exploit unique survey data on firms’ adoption of AI technology and estimate its productivity effects with a sample of German firms. We employ both a cross-sectional dataset and a panel database. To address the potential endogeneity of AI adoption, we also implement an IV approach. We find positive and significant effects of the use of AI on firm productivity. This finding holds for different measures of AI usage, i.e., an indicator variable of AI adoption, and the intensity with which firms use AI methods in their business processes.

The present study investigates the effects of energy-related technologies on economic performance at firm level. We distinguish clearly between adoption and use of energy-related technologies (process innovation in the broad sense) and product innovation in energy-related fields. We take into consideration four energy-related policy instruments (and expected demand for energy-related new products and services). We investigate the possibility of indirect effects of policy on performance via adoption or innovation by interacting adoption and innovation variables with policy instrument dummies. We test our hypotheses not only for the pooled data but also separately for the three countries (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) that are taken into consideration in this study. We find a positive direct effect of investment expenditures for energy-related technologies on labour productivity and a positive indirect effect of energy taxes via investment in energy-related technologies. We find neither direct nor indirect effects of product innovation in energy-related products on labour productivity. No differences among the three countries could be detected., KOF Working Papers, 419