The impact of information technologies on firm productivity: Empirical evidence from Spain

The results obtained reveal that the sensitivity of labour productivity to changes in technological capital intensity is positive and significant when firm-specific effects are corrected, however, this relationship is not significant when not only firm- specific, but also period- specific effects, are corrected.

Abstract

In this article, we propose to analyse the impact of investments in information technologies (ITs) on the productivity of Spanish firms. Using a representative panel of 341 medium-sized and large firms, we used a Cobb–Douglas function to measure the contribution of IT capital to labour productivity. The results obtained reveal that the sensitivity of labour productivity to changes in technological capital intensity is positive and significant when firm-specific effects are corrected. However, this relationship is not significant when not only firm-specific, but also period-specific effects, are corrected. The conclusion obtained from these results shows that, although the firms in the samples experienced some improvement in labour productivity in the considered period, this improvement was not significantly derived from IT investment.