Information Technology and Productivity Growth in the 2000s

Abstract

US productivity growth experienced continued productivity growth after 2000 even as investment, particularly in information technology (IT), slowed. This paper uses industry-level data to examine the link between average labor productivity (ALP) growth and IT in the post-2000 period. We use difference-in-difference and cross-sectional regressions to show that the link between ALP growth and IT-intensity is weaker after 2000 than before. These results are robust to alternative measures of IT-intensity such as the IT share of capital services, the level of IT capital depth, and the share of IT capital services in total output. We conclude that the post-2000 productivity gains in the United States do not appear to have been driven directly by IT. Copyright Verein für Socialpolitik and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007.

Information and Communications Technology as a General-Purpose Technology: Evidence from US Industry Data

“…Hence one needs to generalize the approach followed by, e.g., Stiroh (2002b) who looks for ICT spillovers by regressing TFP growth on only the current‐year growth rate of IT capital. See Stiroh (2002a, 2006) and Stiroh and Botsch (2006) for related work. Brynjolfsson and Hitt (2003) also find significant lags in firm‐level data, which nicely complements our more aggregative evidence.…”

ICT as a general-purpose technology: The productivity of ICT in the United States revisited

“…This so-called "ICT-centred story" (Oliner et al 2008) highlights the increasing importance of ICT as a driver of rising productivity and economic growth through direct TFP increase in ICT-producing sectors and through capital deepening and labour productivity improvement in ICT-using sectors (e.g. Jorgenson et al 2003Jorgenson et al , 2008Sichel 2000, 2002;Stiroh and Botsch, 2007;Inklaar et al 2005). Despite this appealing argument, previous studies have also produced mixed findings on ICT's role in growth even with more rigorous analyses by subsequent researchers (for example, Gordon, 2000;Colecchia and Schreyer, 2002;Cardona et al 2013).…”

The Rise and Fall of German Productivity Software Investment as the Decisive Driver

“…This decline has been attributed to a lack of ICT investment . In the US, strong ICT investments more than offset the reductions in non-ICT capital deepening and total factor productivity in the US (Stiroh and Botsch 2007). Table 2 isolates the contributions from the four broad sources of productivity growth.…”

“…Here we follow a broad literature that established categories for ICTIntensive and non ICT intensive industries by using the capital shares. In our case, we use the most traditional measure (Stiroh and Botsch, 2007) and identify those industries as software intensive whose software capital depth (software capital per hours worked) exceed the median. 3 Table 1 reports all industries and their software intensity classification.…”