availability of digital technology;<sup>3</sup> and (iii) openness to trade ( _lopeness_ ), given the likelihood of greater adoption and usage of technology in more economically, globally-integrated countries, per the arguments of endogenous growth theory made by Grossman and Helpman (1992) and Harrison (1996).

For both sets of multivariate conditional correlations, level of development is positively and significantly associated with digital technology usage of households and businesses. However, the sign and significance of the estimated coefficients on the other three control variables is weakly and erratically related to household digital technology use. This contrasts sharply with the strong, significant and stable estimated coefficients on the same variables when considering digital technology usage by businesses. There are subtle points here worth emphasizing: prior to inclusion of the physical infrastructure index, the estimated coefficients on the rate of inflation were consistently negative and strongly significant. With the inclusion of the physical infrastructure index, although the estimated coefficients on the inflation variable are negative across all specifications, only in specification 3 is the coefficient statistically significant, and then only at the 10 percent level. In almost all the specifications the control variables measuring trade openness and a country’s available physical infrastructure are both highly significant and positively associated with businesses’ use of digital technology.

Turning to the first labor market policy variable of specific interest to our research questions, the level of the statutory minimum wage ( _lmwtova_pw_ ), the sign and significance of the estimated coefficient on this variable shift across specifications and is weak when related to household usage of digital technology. However, the sign and significance of the coefficient on the statutory minimum wage is consistent and robust to changes in specification in our analysis of businesses’ usage: a higher statutory minimum wage is significantly, positively associated with the extent of digital technology use by businesses.

There are two simple economic explanations for the sign and significance of this relationship, and one that may purely be statistical. First, a higher statutory minimum wage is more likely to bind, particularly at the lower-end of the labor force distribution by skill and productivity levels. Therefore, at higher levels, the statutory minimum wage could increase firms’ incentives to invest in digital technology that substitutes for labor inputs and thus saves on labor costs. Second, faced with a policy-mandated lower bound on wages, firms will have an incentive to make investments that combine labor more efficiently with tools to raise marginal labor product above the mandated minimum wage. The purely statistical explanation is that in lower-income countries -even after controlling for income level- the statutory minimum wage may really only effectively cover employment in the public sector and state-owned enterprises. In such countries, beyond these segments of the working population, there is very little formal (i.e. regulated) employment and few firms with the inclination or resources to invest in digital technology. That our estimated relationships are statistically strong and of the economically expected sign for digital technology use by businesses (and substantially less stable and significant for usage by households), provides support for the economic interpretations of the results.

> 3 We are grateful to Klaus Adolfo Koch-Saldarriaga for suggesting this control.  As documented in World Bank (2016) much of the literature on the ‘digital divide’ shows that a country’s physical infrastructure is a key enabling factor to making internet and digital technologies accessible to households and firms.

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