IT-enabled business practices: Empirical investigations of productivity and innovation

My dissertation centers on the impact of information technology (IT) investments on business processes. I seek to understand the way organizations use software to share information with partners in trade and facilitate innovation. Information-sharing IT and process innovation are complementary under the right circumstances, and understanding why and how the strategic use of software impacts organizations has wide-ranging implications, from supply-chain structure to understanding the contribution of the manufacturing sector to the national economy. The first chapter of my dissertation uses proprietary Census data to investigate the impact of e-selling on total factor productivity (TFP). I find that although large plants see a TFP increase related to e-selling, small plants do not. This highlights the need to understand economies of scale related to IT within organizations. The second chapter of my dissertation is an investigation into complementarities between IT and a firm’s research and development (R&D) efforts. While there has been considerable attention paid to IT as a complement to firm capabilities, there is less work examining complementarities between IT and other inputs to innovation. This research represents a novel investigation into the relationship between IT investments and a firm’s innovative strategy.Ph.D