Productivity and HGEs: resilience and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic

The impact of crises on firm performance has been studied widely. This paper explores the relationship between firms’ reaction to COVID-19 (in employment) and the adoption of digital technologies, taking into account their productivity, digitalisation level and high-growth episodes before the crisis. We match the EIB Group Survey of Investment and Investment Finance with ORBIS database for 27 EU Member States and the United Kingdom. We find that firms with higher productivity levels are less prone to decrease the number of employees in the short and long term due to the pandemic. High-growth enterprises are less likely to expect a reduction in the number of employees in the long term. Moreover, firms in highly digitalised sectors have a lower probability to reduce the number of employees. Finally, our results suggest that COVID-19 leads firms to increase their use of digital technologies, especially those that were already more digitalised.