Abstract:
The use of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, or smart devices will go hand in hand with higher productivity, higher product quality, and lower trade costs. Therefore, it can be expected to be positively related to export activities. This paper uses firm level data for manufacturing enterprises from the 27 member countries of the European Union collected in 2025 to shed further light on this issue by investigating the link between the use of advanced technologies and extensive margins of exports. Applying a new machine-learning estimator, Kernel-Regularized Least Squares (KRLS), which does not impose any restrictive assumptions for the functional form of the relation between margins of exports, use of advanced technologies, and any control variables, we find that firms which use more advanced technologies do more often export and do export to more different destinations.
