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銀行業資訊科技支出之價值攸關性
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1. Introduction
In recent decades, the global economy has been buffeted by revolutionary economic
storms. The economy has moved from leveraging physical and financial resources to
leveraging human and intellectual resources. In this so-called knowledge era, information
technology (IT) plays a critical role in summarizing data, creating and exchanging
information, identifying and analyzing problems, and facilitating the creation and sharing of
valuable knowledge among business organizations (Santos and Sussman, 2000; Sher and
Lee, 2004). In particular, IT has been regarded as one of the most crucial factors underlying
the dynamics in the banking industry structure and performance. Banks have invested
substantial resources in IT, but existing literatures find inconsistent evidence on associations
between IT spending and performance measures in the banking industry (Council of
Economic Advisers, 2001; Beccalli, 2007; Martin-Oliver and Salas-Fumás, 2008).
Motivated by the inconsistency between banks’ heavy IT expenditures and the lack of
supportive empirical evidence on the positive benefits, we examine the role of IT
expenditure in the value creation for banks from the market valuation perspective. More
specifically, we argue that when contemporaneous accounting and productivity measures are
used, several potential problems emerge. First, both measures are unable to fully incorporate
benefits that have not been transformed into “physical” inflows, such as customer
satisfaction or firms’ brand names. Second, it may take some time for the positive effects of
IT expenditure to be realized. In other words, there may be time lags between increased IT
spending and realized return-on-investment. Hence, to examine the performance effect of IT,
using a measure that can anticipate and incorporate long-term or intangible economic
benefits is necessary. Since the market value is characterized by reflecting all value-relevant
information (Ohlson, 1995; Barth, Beaver, and Landsman, 2001), this study evaluates the
performance effect of IT expenditure for banks from the market valuation perspective.
Specifically, based on annual data from U.S. banks
1
during the 2001-2010 periods and
applying the Ohlson model
2
, our major findings are: (1) IT expenditures are significantly and
1 We choose U.S. data because U.S. market is regarded as the most efficient market in the world, and details on
IT expenditures are rarely systematically disclosed by firms in the rest of the world.
2 Ohlson (1995) model is one of the most extensively utilized empirical models in the accounting literature
when examining the performance effect of certain events or expenditures. Bernard (1995) and Scott (2007)
mentioned that the Ohlson (1995) model shows how the market value of the firm can be expressed in terms of
fundamental balance sheet and income statement components instead of the net present value of firm’s future
cash inflows. The model assumes ideal conditions in capital markets, including dividend irrelevancy. This
model is also called the residual income model. The Ohlson (1995) model can be applied to value the firm at
any point in time for which financial statements are available. Because the Ohlson (1995) model circumvents
the estimation of a firm’s future cash flows, plenty of accounting literature uses this model to test the value
relevance of financial statement items. We choose it as a tool to value the IT expenditure in this paper.