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This paper aims to provide a survey of existing literature on the economic impacts of the internet on firm development, and outlines an overall framework of the existing studies. The purpose is to show how the internet affects firm development, which may help policymakers and other researchers to have a better knowledge of existing research characteristics, problems and future directions.

The authors review the studies on the economic impacts of the internet on firm characteristics and external environment, identify the characteristics of the existing literature and problems and discuss the directions of possible future research.

The authors find that the impacts of the internet on firm development mainly display two relevant mechanisms (firm characteristics and external environment), and they can be grouped into six channels (firm innovation, firm business mode, firm performance, firm productivity, firm import and export trade and firm location selection).

This study builds up a framework of how the internet impacts on firm development, which can add value to the future research of firm intelligent transaction modes in the crowd intelligence network.

Utilizing data from the 2017 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS2017), the paper aims to investigate the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) adoption on residents' self-rated health and reveals the mechanisms behind ICT.

In the study, ICT adoption is defined as a dummy variable, which takes the value of one if respondents adopt the computers or mobile phone. Meanwhile, respondents' perceptions on five categories of self-rated health are used to construct the dependent variable. Then, based on a fixed-effects regression model, the ordinary least squares (OLS) and ordered probit approaches are applied to estimate their association. Moreover, the two-stage least squares (2SLS) and instrumental variable (IV)-oprobit methods are used to tackle the potential endogeneity of ICT adoption. Finally, the heterogeneity across individuals and regions as well as the underlying mechanisms are discussed.

The results indicate that ICT adoption significantly improves residents' self-rated health, which confirms the health utility model with ICT adoption. The conclusion is robust after overcoming the endogeneity issues with IV. In addition, heterogeneity analysis shows that ICT adoption is more beneficial to the health of residents who are male, young, better educated and those who live in the rural areas and in central and western China. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that ICT adoption for searching health-related information and improving social capital are two crucial mechanisms underlying its health effects.

The findings of this research can help Chinese Government improve population health by issuing corresponding digital and health policies at the regional and individual level.

First, the study provides fresh microscopic evidence on health outcomes of ICT adoption based on data from the latest wave of CGSS2017. Second, individual and regional heterogeneity is extensively discussed in contrast to most related macro studies that consider average effects. Third, the study addresses underlying mechanisms that have not been thoroughly tested or studied primarily on a theoretical level.