Big Data and Firm-Level Productivity – A Cross-Country Comparison

Until today, the question of how digitalisation and, in particular, individual digital technologies affect productivity is still the subject of controversial debate. Using administrative firm-level data provided by the Dutch and the German statistical offices, we investigate the economic importance of data, in particular, the relation between the application of big data analytics (BDA) and labour productivity (LP) at the firm level. We find that a simple binary measure indicating the mere usage of BDA fails to capture the association between BDA and LP. In contrast, measures of BDA diversity, defined as conducting BDA across multiple data sources, clearly show a positive and statistically significant relationship between BDA and LP, even after controlling for a firm's general digitalisation level. Hence, our results suggest that one mechanism through which firms conducting BDA may achieve greater productivity gains is by incorporating data from multiple domains.

Andres, Raphaela, Thomas Niebel and Robin Sack (2025), Big Data and Firm-Level Productivity – A Cross-Country Comparison, Information Economics and Policy 71 , 101147