We examine the role of the ICT revolution in driving productivity growth behavior for the United States and an aggregate of ten Western European nations (the EU-10) from 1977 to 2015. We find that the standard growth accounting approach is deficient when it separates sources of growth between...

After fifty years of catching up to the United States level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity...

(1) Whatever happened to the cyclical effect? Skeptics were justified on the basis of data through the end of 1999 in their claim that part of the post-1995 productivity growth revival reflected the normal cyclical correlation between productivity and output growth. In contrast data through...

This paper argues that the late 1990s boom in ICT investment was unsustainable for both macro and micro reasons; we are unlikely again to witness an interval in which computer hardware investment grows at an annual rate greater than 30 percent for five straight years. Analysts who base their...

Using pooled cross-section, time-series data for 44 industries over the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in the United States, I find no econometric evidence that computer investment is positively linked to TFP growth (over and above its inclusion in the TFP measure). However,...

During the four years 1995-99 U. S. productivity growth experienced a strong revival and achieved growth rates exceeding that of the golden age' of 1913-72. Accordingly many observers have declared the New Economy' (the Internet and the accompanying acceleration of technical change in computers...

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some...

I speculate that technological spillover effects may have become more important over time as IT penetrated the U.S. economy. The rationale is that IT may speed up the process of knowledge transfer and make these knowledge spillovers more effective. Using US input-output tables for years 1958,...