مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Computers and the internet are well-established working tools. They have changed workplaces significantly, contributed to improving labour productivity and changed the demand for employee skills and qualifications. The technological prerequisites for mobile internet, which is diffusing rapidly through the economy, are advances in high-speed wireless connections and mobile devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. McKinsey Global Institute (2013) considers mobile internet as one of twelve disruptive technologies with a very high potential economic impact. OECD (2012, p. 22) motivates the transformation from the information economy to the internet economy and points out that “Wireless internet connections are the key source of recent internet growth, increasing rapidly since 2001 and overtaking fixed broadband subscriptions in 2009.” In Germany, the number of regular high speed mobile internet users increased from 13.6 million in 2008 to 52.6 million in 2014. During the same period, mobile data volume increased even more rapidly, from 11.5 to 394.8 Petabytes (see Fig. A.1).

While the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in determining labour productivity is well studied,1 there is, to the best of our knowledge, no empirical work on the firm-level productivity effects of mobile internet so far. Why would we expect productivity effects from mobile internet? One important result from the empirical analysis of ICT is that reduced communication costs support the decentralisation of organisation, such as the reduction of hierarchy levels and the implementation of autonomous working teams (see for example Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, & Hitt, 2002). Mobile internet access can further improve information flows and communication and reduce involved costs. Employees are now able to access their firms’ data and documents anywhere, at any time. This supports decentralisation in terms of organisation and time. By contrast, coordination costs might increase if physical meetings become more difficult to arrange since everybody wants to be flexible. Moreover, monitoring might become more difficult if employees work geographically dispersed. Thus, the net contribution of mobile internet is a priori not evident.

In our analysis, we take a firm-level perspective in order to analyse the role that employees’ mobile internet access plays for firms’ labour productivity. Based on a sample of 2143 firms from the German manufacturing and services industry, we estimate classical production functions. Mobile internet use as an input factor is measured by the percentage share of employees with mobile internet access in each firm. We control for ICT use at the workplace other than mobile internet access by including measures of the use of computers and access to fixed line internet. Since the estimates of the effect of mobile internet access might be prone to reverse causality, i.e. more productive firms have more resources to invest in new technologies, we apply an instrumental variables approach.