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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Area: IT Management
Committee Members: Dr. Chris Forman (co-chair), Dr. Marco Ceccagnoli (co-chair), Dr. Sabyasachi Mitra, Dr. Eric Overby, Dr. Marius Niculescu
Title: IT-Enabled Business Practices: Empirical Investigations of Productivity and Innovation
Essay 1: Does IT Level the Playing Field for Small Establishments? Evidence from Manufacturing
We examine whether information technology investments benefit from economies of scale. Using U.S. Census non-public microdata, we examine the productivity benefits of IT investments for over 11,000 manufacturing plants over a nine year period. We find evidence that large plants exhibit differential productivity benefits from IT investments relative to smaller plants. These differences are robust to a range of alternative estimators and cannot be explained by cross-sectional variance in firm size, plant and firm age, and position in the supply chain. The results have important implications for small plants that firm-level studies have been unable to reveal.
Essay 2: The Interplay of Information Technology and R&D and its Implications for Innovation
Throughout the innovative process, the management of information flows means ensuring both confidentiality from competitors and availability to collaborators. Heavy investment in R&D signals the need for strong knowledge management capabilities, which can be helped or hindered by investment in information technologies. Thus far, the complementarity or substitutability of IT and R&D is unclear. This study investigates this relationship across industries using Harte-Hanks and Compustat data over the time period 2004-2008. We find that, on average, IT and R&D are substitutes. This result is robust across a number of empirical settings.
