Transformative Technology Adoption and Firm Productivity: Illusionary Revolution or Guaranteed Innovation?

This study examines the impact of strategic technological innovations (e.g., adoption of fourth industrial revolu-tion (4IR) technologies) on firms’ productivity. To estimate the heterogeneous effects of innovation efforts on firms’ labor productivity, this paper employs a quantile regression model and calculates higher moments of the empirical distributions. This study uses data from 11,654 Korean firms that responded to surveys in 2017 and 2018, comprising 23,308 observations. Our empirical results find that 4IR technology adoption has a sig-nificant impact on labor productivity for firms across all quantiles, while the estimates of 4IR technology adoption coefficient on labor productivity are much larger in upper quantiles. This estimated impact of adopting 4IR technology on labor productivity at the upper quantile differs compared to the estimated impact of another innovation strategy, or internal R&D. Notably, adopting 4IR technology increases the median labor productivity of firms and the kurtosis of its distribution. Thus, firms that adopted 4IR technology show labor productivity gains more consistently than those that did not, with few outliers.