CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search

Viewing papers 11 through 14 of 14

• Working Paper

  
  
  Are Some Firms Better at IT? Differing Relationships between Productivity and IT Spending
  

  October 1999

  Authors: Kevin M Stolarick

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-99-13

  Although recent studies have found a positive relationship between spending on information technology and firm productivity, the magnitude of this relationship has not been as dramatic as one would expect given the anecdotal evidence. Data collected by the Bureau of the Census is analyzed to investigate the relationship between plant-level productivity and spending on IT. This relationship is investigated by separating the manufacturing plants in the sample along two dimensions, total factor productivity and IT spending. Analysis along these dimensions reveals that there are significant differences between the highest and lowest productivity plants. The highest productivity plants tend to spend less on IT while the lowest productivity plants tend to spend more on IT. Although there is support for the idea that lower productivity plants are spending more on IT to compensate for their productivity shortcomings, the results indicate that this is not the only difference. The robustness of this finding is strengthened by investigating changes in productivity and IT spending over time. High productivity plants with the lowest amounts of IT spending tend to remain high productivity plants with low IT spending while low productivity plants with high IT spending tend to remain low productivity plants with high IT spending. The results show that management skill, as measured by the overall productivity level of a firm, is an additional factor that must be taken into consideration when investigating the IT "productivity paradox."
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Decomposing Learning By Doing in New Plants
  

  December 1992

  Authors: Byong-Hyong Bahk, Michael Gort

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-92-16

  The paper examines learning by doing in the context of a production function in which the other arguments are labor, human capital, physical capital, and vintage as a proxy for embodied technical change in physical capital. Learning is further decomposed into organization learning, capital learning, and manual task learning. The model is tested with time series and cross section data for various samples of up to 2,150 plants over a 14 year period. Word Perfect Version
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Managerial Tenure, Business Age And Small Business Dynamics
  

  September 1992

  Authors: James A Schmitz, Thomas J Holmes

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-92-11

  This paper studies a Census Bureau survey of the small business sector that contains information on business age, business size and other proxies for business quality, information, typically available on business data sets, as well as proxies for the quality of the manager of each business, information that is not common to such data sets. One of the key proxies for managerial quality is the length of time the manager has been running the business, that is, managerial tenure. With proxies for both the underlying quality of each business and for the quality of the manager running the business, we are able to begin separating the influences of the manager from that of the underlying business on such factors as business discontinuance and business transfer. An example of the questions we explore is: Holding business quality fixed, what is the impact of the manager on the probability of business discontinuance? Regarding this question, we find that managers have a large impact on the course of their businesses, in particular, among businesses of the same age, managerial tenure has a significant impact on the probability of business discontinuance and transfer.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  The Effect Of Takeovers On The Employment And Wages Of Central-Office And Other Personnel
  

  June 1989

  Authors: Donald Siegel, Frank R Lichtenberg

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-89-03

  Recent high rates of takeover activity have stimulated considerable interest and concern among policymakers and the public about changes in corporate ownership, but relatively little evidence about the "read" (as opposed to financial) effects of takeovers has been available. This paper presents evidence concerning the effects of ownership change on the employment and wages of central-office workers -- according to some views, those likely to be most affected by takeovers -- and contracts them with the effects on manufacturing plant employees. The evidence is based on a large, longitudinal, plant-level data set derived from Census Bureau surveys of both administrative and production establishments. The major findings of the analysis are as follows. Central offices that changed owners between 1977 and 1982 had substantially lower -- about 16 percent lower -- employment growth during that period than central offices not changing owners. (There was, however, no significant difference in the growth of R&D employment.) They also had slower growth in wages -- about 9 percent lower. Changing owners had a much more negative effect on employment growth in central offices than it did in manufacturing plants: 16 percent compared to 5 percent. This implies that the ratio of central-office to plant employees declines about 11 percent in firms changing owners: about 7.2 administrators per 10-00 plant employees are eliminated. These findings are consistent with the view that reduction of administrative overhead is an important motive for changes in ownership. Failure to account for reductions in central-office employment results in a substantial (about 40 percent) underestimate of the productivity gains associated with ownership change. We also provide evidence concerning the relationship between firm size and administrative-intensity.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---