Download or read book Empirical Essays on Information Technology and Productivity Growth written by Thomas Strobel and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Knowledge Technology and Economic Growth written by Sung-min Kim and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on the Impact of Information Technology written by Sumit Bhansali and published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2009-08-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five essays in this thesis look at how specific information technologies (such as Electronic Document Management, Semantic Web and RuleML) and IT in general can be used to automate and standardize data and processes, enable faster and more accurate information flow, and improve individual as well as firm performance. The first essay is an analytical review-type study that provides a comprehensive survey of research literature about different complementary organizational assets that when coupled with IT can lead to higher firm performance. The second essay presents the causal effects of digitizing work on information workers' time-use and performance at a large insurance firm. The third essay examines the IT productivity relationship using a large primary source firm-level dataset about IT investments that spans the 2003- 2005 period. The fourth essay explores what high-performing firms specifically do to gain the greatest benefits from their IT investments. The fifth essay shows a detailed, realistic e- business application scenario that exploits capabilities of new Semantic Web technologies.
Download or read book Essays on Technology Trade and Welfare written by Jun Ruan and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology is a key determinant of comparative advantage among nations. As information technology improves and the nations of the world become economically integrated, concern arises over the dissipation of high-income economies' technological advantage. The three essays in this dissertation explore the trade and technology relationship, which is essential to economic growth in both high-and low-income nations. The first essay employs a monopolistic competition framework to investigate the effects -- on each country's relative wages, share of global markets, and welfare -- of the productivity convergence between a technological leader and follower. Results indicate technological convergence improves the follower's competitiveness at the expense of the leader's. Nevertheless, the leader's welfare improves unambiguously on account of the increase in its terms of trade, while the follower's welfare changes in a direction depending on the relative strength of convergence's income and terms-of-trade effects. We use data from 17 food industries in 30 countries, 1993-2001, to test these analytical predictions. Convergence has lifted followers' income and global value-added share. Followers' welfare has risen since convergence's income improvement has outweighed its terms-of-trade deterioration. Simultaneously, leaders' welfare has improved in response to their improved terms of trade. The second essay employs data from 35 countries in 128 ISIC 4-digit manufacturing industries, 1993 - 2001, to test the empirical validity of these same hypotheses for the international manufacturing sector. We find that, just as in the food sector, convergence improves followers' welfare through its positive income effects. However, we do not find empirical evidence of convergence's terms-of-trade effects. The third essay examines trade liberalization's effects on the geographical distribution of productivity, and consequent cross-country resource and market-share allocations, of five processed food industries. We find that the mean and other quantiles of the global productivity distribution shift to the right as international trade liberalizes. The latter result implies that resources are reallocated toward countries with faster productivity growth. The three essays jointly highlight the important influence of global integration and technological convergence on nations' economic growth and well-being. However, policies promoting integration and convergence should pay attention to the consequent intra-country redistribution of income between producers and consumers.
Download or read book Computers and Productivity written by Thomas Hempell and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-01-17 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information and communication technologies (ICTs) create potentials for considerable productivity gains and for higher economic growth. However, ICTs also pose varied challenges to firms in order to benefit from these potentials. Highlighting the importance of innovations, firm-sponsored training, and recruitment of high-skilled workers, this monograph analyses why and to what extent firms differ in their capabilities to make ICT work productively. The work also comprises a detailed discussion of economic theory concerning ICT use and complementary firm strategies. In addition it provides a comprehensive treatment of various methodological issues concerning the measurement of firm-level productivity in econometric analyses.
Download or read book Essays on Information Technology Productivity Growth and Employment Structure written by Hyunbae Chun and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Economic Growth Institutions and Technology Diffusion written by Diana Maria Van Patten Rivera and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter of this dissertation (joint with Esteban M ndez-Chac n), we study the short- and long-run effects of large firms on economic development. To do so, we use evidence from one of the largest multinationals of the 20th Century: The United Fruit Company (UFCo). The firm was given a large land concession in Costa Rica--one of the so-called "Banana Republics"--from 1889 to 1984. Using administrative census data with census-block geo-references from 1973 to 2011, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity (RD) design that exploits a quasi-random assignment of land. We find that the firm had a positive and persistent effect on living standards. Regions within the UFCo were 26% less likely to be poor in 1973 than nearby counterfactual locations, with only 63% of the gap closing over the following 3 decades. Company documents explain that a key concern at the time was to attract and maintain a sizable workforce, which induced the firm to invest heavily in local amenities that likely account for our result. We then build a dynamic spatial model in which a firm's labor market power within a region depends on how mobile workers are across locations and run counterfactual exercises. The model is consistent with observable spatial frictions and the RD estimates, and shows that the firm increases aggregate welfare by 2.9%. This effect is increasing in worker mobility: If workers were half as mobile, the firm would have decreased aggregate welfare by 6%. The model also shows that a local monopsonist compensates workers mostly through local amenities keeping wages low, and leads to higher welfare levels than a counterfactual with perfectly competitive labor markets in all regions. In the second chapter of this dissertation, I study an important question in the field of economic growth and development: How developing countries learn to adopt and use new technologies. In particular, the chapter studies how countries learn from each other through international trade. First, I build a panel of bilateral trade flows between industries in different countries. Matching this panel with data on industry-level productivity, I document how productivity grows systematically faster for countries that trade with partners with better technologies, but that this is reducing the gap between local and foreign productivity. Second, I build a model in which knowledge transfers can occur through imported technology, leading to productivity growth. In my framework, agents have heterogeneous learning abilities: The probability of a producer adopting a technology slightly better than hers is larger than the probability of adopting a much more sophisticated one--the trade-off being that conditional on adoption, more sophisticated technologies lead to higher productivity. I document how the model matches the empirical dependence of productivity growth on productivity gaps across trading partners, and the firm size distribution. The model also highlights how ignoring differences in learning abilities can overestimate the impact of exposure to high-TFP trading partners, leading to suboptimal trade policies. I conclude that developing countries should direct relatively more trade to mid-productive countries--as opposed to very productive ones--to maximize technology transfers and increase growth.
Download or read book Four Essays on Technology Productivity and Environment written by Jan Larsson and published by Goteborg University. This book was released on 2006 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Productivity Technology and Economic Growth written by Bart van Ark and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth presents a selection of recent research advances on long term economic growth. While the contributions stem from both economic history, macro- and microeconomics and the economics of innovation, all papers depart from a common viewpoint: the key factor behind long term growth is productivity, and the latter is primarily driven by technological change. Most contributions show implicitly or explicitly that technological change is at least partly dependent on growth itself. Furthermore, technology appears to interact strongly with investment in physical and human capital as well as with changes in historical, political and institutional settings. Together these papers are an up-to-date account of the remarkable convergence in theoretical and empirical work on productivity and growth over the past decades. The first part deals with the characteristics of growth regimes over longer periods, ranging from 20 years to two centuries. The next four chapters study the determinants of productivity growth and, in some cases, productivity slowdown during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The final five chapters focus on the role of technology and innovation as the key determinants of growth. Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth is, therefore, a welcome collection for academic scholars and graduate students in economics, history and related social sciences as well as for policy makers.
Download or read book Wired for Innovation written by Erik Brynjolfsson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-02-08 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two experts on the information economy explore the true economic value of technology and innovation. A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of returns to their technology investment are doing more than just buying technology; they are inventing new forms of organizational capital to become digital organizations. These innovations include a cluster of organizational and business-process changes, including broader sharing of information, decentralized decision-making, linking pay and promotions to performance, pruning of non-core products and processes, and greater investments in training and education. Innovation continues through booms and busts. This book provides an essential guide for policy makers and economists who need to understand how information technology is transforming the economy and how it will create value in the coming decade.
Download or read book Productivity Information technology and the American growth resurgence written by Dale Weldeau Jorgenson and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of information technology and economic growth since 1995 that tracks the American growth resurgence to its sources within individual industries. The American economy has experienced renewed growth since 1995, with this surge rooted in the development and deployment of information technology (IT). This book traces the American growth resurgence to its sources within individual industries, documents the critical role of IT, and shows how U.S. nvestment in IT has important parallels in other developed countries.In analyzing the experience in the United States, the authors identify four IT-producing industries, 17 IT-using industries, and 23 non-IT industries and show that the IT-producing and IT-using industries play a disproportionate role in the American growth resurgence. These industries account for only about 30 percent of US GDP but contributed half of the acceleration in economic growth. The study finds that differences in the relative importance of IT-producing industries in other G7 countries have contributed to wide disparities in the impact of IT on economic growth. Productivity, Volume 3 will be of special interest to analysts of the "new economy" and its remarkable persistence through periods of boom and recession.
Download or read book Three Essays on the Economic Impacts of Information Technology on Efficiency and Productivity written by Young Bong Chang and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overall, this thesis helps develop a deeper understanding of the ways IT impacts efficiency and productivity and addresses unanswered questions on the economic impacts of IT.
Download or read book Three Essays in the Economics of Information Technology written by Heekyung Hellen Kim and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter is to investigate the impact of a free on-line repository of research articles on the diffusion of their ideas measured by the citation counts. The key questions that this chapter answers are as following: 1) does a free on-line repository of research articles increase the diffusion of their scholarly ideas measured by their citations?; 2) who benefits from the free access? By using a dataset from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), an open repository of research articles, and employing a natural experiment that allows the effect of free access separate from other confounding factors, this study identifies the causal effect of free access on the citation counts as well as shows a heterogeneous effect of free access on both supply and demand side. The second chapter is to study the correlation between CEO pay and information technology. The hypothesis is that IT increases "effective size" of the firm that a top manager controls and thus her marginal productivity. In turn, in an efficient market, the firms with a higher degree of information technology will reward their CEOs with a higher compensation. The third chapter is to examine whether firms that emphasize decision making based on data and business analytics ("data driven decision making" or DDD) show higher performance. Using detailed survey data on the business practices and information technology investments of 179 large publicly traded firms, this study finds that firms that adopt DDD have output and productivity that is 5-6% higher than what would be expected given their other investments and information technology usage. Furthermore, the relationship between DDD and performance also appears in other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. Using instrumental variables methods, this study finds evidence that the effect of DDD on the productivity do not appear to be due to reverse causality. These results provide some of the first large scale data on the direct connection between data-driven decision making and firm performance.
Download or read book Essays on Technology Investment and Business Cycles written by Takuji Kawamoto and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Enhancing Productivity Growth in the Information Age written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2007-01-19 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report summarizes a workshopâ€"Strengthening Science-Based Decision-Making: Implementing the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants held June 7-10, 2004, in Beijing, China. The presentations and discussions summarized here describe the types of scientific information necessary to make informed decisions to eliminate the production and use of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) banned under the Stockholm Convention, sources of information; scientifically informed strategies for eliminating POPs, elements of good scientific advice, such as transparency, peer review, and disclosure of conflicts of interest; and information dealing with POPs that decision makers need from the scientific community, including next steps to make such science available and ensure its use on a continuing basis.
Download or read book Three Essays on Investment specific Technical Change and Economic Growth written by Tang-Chih Lee and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This dissertation investigates the relation between investment-specific technical change and long-run economic growth. The first essay points out the discrepancy between the steady state growth theorem and recent economic growth driven by information technology. Previous study finds that investment-specific technological progress accounts for 58% of economic growth in the U.S. However, their result hinges on the assumption of the Cobb-Douglas production function. This paper employs the CES production function to investigate the effect of investment-specific technological progress on long-run economic growth. In the steady state, quality improvement in each vintage is directed to expand more functions in one machine, resulting in contraction in the types of capital. The offsetting effect between quality and variety implies that the relative capital income share is constant in the steady state. Empirical tests for the U.S. data show that investment-specific technological progress does not generate long-run economic growth. The elasticity of substitution is significantly less than one, and that there is an offsetting effect to investment-specific technological progress. The second essay investigates the quality changes in capital and labor inputs across 46 industries from 1968 to 2001. We incorporate a time-varying quality measure to the efficiency units of capital. The result indicates that the average quality of capital assets over time has improved 46 percent in the cross industry average. The quality improvement effect accounts for 30 percent in the total growth of the efficiency units of capital. Although the net quantity effect is still the largest component in the growth of the efficiency units of capital, there is significant substitution among different vintages and asset types as well. The average quality growth in the efficiency units of labor is 17 percent. The third essay investigates unbalanced growth facts and their implications for existing growth theory. We find that the balanced growth implication is consistent with data for the United States at the national aggregate level, but not at a more disaggregate level and internationally. Among the various unbalanced growth facts, the increases in the depreciation rates of equipment and of aggregate capital have the most significant impact on the growth theory. Under the Cobb-Douglas framework, an increasing depreciation rate of equipment can result in rising, constant, or declining rate of return of equipment, depending on the magnitude of the decreasing net marginal product effect and the capital loss effect.
Download or read book Essays in Trade Innovation and Productivity written by Kaiji Gong and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the determinants of firms' productivity growth and innovation activities. The first chapter studies the local technology spillover effects originated from multinational firms' innovation activities. The second chapter discusses the impact of import competition from China on U.S. firms' innovation activities. The third chapter introduces a new measure of firm-level regulation, and examines the consequences of rising regulation intensity in the U.S. on firms' production choices. Chapter 1 identifies the causal impact of U.S. multinationals' technology advances on their subsidiaries and the nearby domestic firms' productivity in China. By combining firm-level panel data from both the U.S. and China, I match U.S. multinationals with their manufacturing subsidiaries in China and measure the multinationals' technology stocks based on their patenting activities. To address potential endogeneity concerns, I introduce an instrumental variable strategy based on the U.S. state level R& D tax credit policies. I find multinationals' technology improvements induce increase in the output and total factor productivity (TFP) of both their subsidiaries and domestic firms in local areas. The magnitude of technology spillovers hinges on local firms' absorptive capacities, and their technological connections to the multinationals. Chapter 2 (co-authored with Rui Xu) analyzes the impact of rising import competition from China on U.S. innovative activities. Using Compustat data, we find that import competition induces R& D expenditures to be reallocated towards more productive and more profitable firms within each industry. Such reallocation effect has the potential to offset the average drop in firm-level R& D identified in the previous literature. Indeed, our quantitative analysis shows no adverse impact of import competition on aggregate R& D expenditures. Taking the analysis beyond manufacturing, we find that import competition has led to reallocation of researchers towards booming service industries, including business and repairs, personal, and financial services. Chapter 3 (co-authored with Constantine Yannelis) introduces a new measure of firm-level regulation. We find that more regulation increases labor and capital inputs. Productivity decreases, which is consistent with a model of regulation inducing non-productive investment. We employ two empirical strategies to identify the causal impact of regulation on firms, first, utilizing structural breaks and industry level regulation changes, and second, computing predicted industry level regulation measures as instruments. We conduct an event study using the surprise 2016 US election results. Firms with higher Dodd-Frank exposure exhibited higher returns following an increase in the probability of repeal.
