Management in America has become significantly more data-intensive, yet the economic, organizational, and strategic implications of this shift are poorly understood. Working with the U.S. Census Bureau, we developed measures of how manufacturing firms have used data to guide decision making over...

We gather detailed data on organizational practices and information technology (IT) use at 253 firms to examine the hypothesis that external focus--the ability of a firm to detect and therefore respond to changes in its external operating environment--increases returns to IT, especially when...

We test for three-way complementarities among information technology (IT), performance pay, and human resource (HR) analytics practices. We develop a principal-agent model examining how these practices work together as an incentive system that produces a larger productivity premium when the...

The "productivity paradox" of information systems (IS) is that, despite enormous improvements in the underlying technology, the benefits of IS spending have not been found in aggregate output statistics. One explanation is that IS spending may lead to increases in product quality or variety...

Although there is good reason to expect that the growth of information work and information technology will significantly affect the trade-offs inherent in different structures for organizing work, the theoretical basis for these changes remains poorly understood. This paper seeks to address...

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...

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...

Many changes in the organization of work in the United States since 1975 have been attributed to the increased capabilities and use of information technology (IT) in business. However, few studies have attempted to empirically examine these relationships. The primary goal of this paper is to...

Starting in 1995, productivity growth took off in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created the lion's share of this productivity surge, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the...

The rapid growth of electronic commerce, along with changes in information, computing, and communications, is having a profound effect on the United States economy. President Clinton recently directed the National Economic Council, in consultation with executive branch agencies, to analyze the...