Information technology and the U.S. productivity revival

"This paper examines the link between information technology (IT) and the U.S. productivity revival in the late 1990s. Industry-level data show a broad productivityresurgence that reflects both the production and the use of IT. The most IT-intensiveindustries experienced significantly larger productivity gains than other industries and awide variety of econometric tests show a strong correlation between IT capitalaccumulation and labor productivity. To quantify the aggregate impact of IT-use andIT-production, a novel decomposition of aggregate labor productivity is presented. Resultsshow that virtually all of the aggregate productivity acceleration can be traced to theindustries that either produce IT or use IT most intensively, with essentially nocontribution from the remaining industries that are less involved in the IT revolution"--Federal Reserve Bank of New York web site.