Publication Details
Abstract
: Commercial banks in emerging economies invest in Big Data infrastructure without direct evidence that such investment improves financial performance, largely because banks do not disclose technology spending separately. This study measures Big Data adoption through a proxy based on the ratio of information technology depreciation to total operating expenses and estimates its effect on profitability and credit quality in the Uzbek banking sector. A panel of six commercial banks observed over seven years, from 2018 to 2024, is analysed with fixed effects estimators, with model choice confirmed by Hausman specification tests and inference based on cluster-robust standard errors. The estimated coefficients of the adoption proxy are positive for return on assets and return on equity and positive for the non-performing loan ratio, but none reaches conventional levels of statistical significance, while the 2023 ownership change dummy is strongly significant across all three specifications. The results indicate that over a seven-year window the measurable effect of Big Data adoption on bank performance is not yet distinguishable from zero, a pattern consistent with the delayed returns documented in the information technology investment literature. The study contributes a replicable measurement procedure for settings where technology expenditure is not separately reported.