A Firm Level Study of Information Technology Productivity in Europe Using Financial and Market Based Measures

Abstract

For many years, business has invested significant resources in information technology, hardware, software, and manpower. The Productivity Paradox is the seeming lack of productivity gains despite the increased investment in IT. For many years the existence of a Productivity Paradox has been the subject of research interest. Conflicting results have been obtained from a variety of data sets. Until this time however there has been no study that has investigated European companies’ use of information technology and its impact on productivity. The objective of this study was to investigate information technology productivity with a new data set from a European published source, and measuring productivity using both market and financial based measures. Results of the study indicated that information technology did have a consistent positive impact on firm level productivity in Europe for the years 1996, 1997, and 1998. Both market and financial based productivity measures provided consistent positive significant returns with regard to IT productivity. The major contribution of the study is that it provides an analysis of the impact of European information technology on firm and economic productivity.