The Productivity Impact of IT Deployment: An Empirical Evaluation of ATM Introduction

The term 'IT paradox' has been widely used to describe the apparent failure of much economic research to discover significant productivity gains associated with IT investment. In part this has been ascribed to measurement problems associated with both IT inputs and with outputs in IT-intensive industries. The current paper seeks to circumvent these difficulties by taking the ATM as a clearly defined embodied IT application and then using anaugmented production function approach to isolate its productivity effectsacross a sample of UK building societies, over the period of the ATM'sdiffusion. The paper finds no support for the 'IT paradox' and reports large robust and statistically significant productivity gains associated with ATM introduction.