TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bloom,Nicholas
AU  - Sadun,Raffaella
AU  - Reenen,John Van
TI  - Americans Do I.T. Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13085
PY  - 2007
Y2  - May 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13085
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13085.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Nicholas Bloom
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: 650/725-3266
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: nbloom@stanford.edu

Raffaella Sadun
Harvard Business School
Morgan Hall 219
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-6190
Fax: 617/495-0355
E-Mail: rsadun@hbs.edu

John Van Reenen
Department of Economics
London School of Economics
Centre for Economic Performance
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
UNITED KINGDOM
Tel: 00 44 207/955-6976
Fax: 00 44 207/955-6848
E-Mail: j.vanreenen@lse.ac.uk
AB  - The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US "productivity miracle" is due to a natural advantage of being located in the US then we would not expect to see any evidence of it for US establishments located abroad. This paper shows in fact that US multinationals operating in the UK do have higher productivity than non-US multinationals in the UK, and this is primarily due to the higher productivity of their IT. Furthermore, establishments that are taken over by US multinationals increase the productivity of their IT, whereas observationally identical establishments taken over by non-US multinationals do not. One explanation for these patterns is that US firms are organized in a way that allows them to use new technologies more efficiently. A model of endogenously chosen organizational form and IT is developed to explain these new micro and macro findings.
ER  -