As search costs and other coordination costs decline, theory predicts that firms should optimally increase the number of suppliers with which they do business. Despite recent declines in these costs due to information technology, there is little evidence of an increase in the number of suppliers...

Information technology has generally reduced search and coordination costs. Ceteris paribus, this should lead firms to increase the number of suppliers with which they do business. However, there is little evidence of an increase in the number of suppliers used in the past few years. On the...

The revival in US productivity growth since the mid-1990s is linked to a surge in investment in information and communication technologies (ICT). Against the backdrop of a weakening link between productivity and traditional innovation inputs (e.g. R&D expenditure), digitization has spurred...

The revival in US productivity growth since the mid-1990s is linked to a surge in investment in information and communication technologies (ICT). Against the backdrop of a weakening link between productivity and traditional innovation inputs (e.g. R&D expenditure), digitization has spurred...

Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for...

We study the fine-grained relationships among information flows, IT use,and individual information-worker productivity, by analyzing work at amidsize executive recruiting firm. We analyze both project-level andindividual-level performance using: (1) direct observation of over125,000 e-mail...