Despite the fast catching-up in ICT diffusion experienced by most EU countries in the last few years, information technologies have so far delivered little productivity gains in Europe. In the second half of the past decade, growth contributions from ICT capital rose in six EU countries only...

While the return to growth in the US is largely credited to the rapid spreading of information technology, a key policy concern everywhere, and notably in Europe, is whether and when the US economic boom will extend abroad, and what role new technologies are about to play. In this paper, I...

This paper explores the quantitative plausibility of three candidate explanations for the European productivity slowdown with respect to the US. The empirical plausibility of the common wisdom on the topic (the IT usageʺ hypothesis) is found to crucially depend on how IT-using industries are...