The financial services industry is the major investor in information technology in the U.S. economy; the typical bank spends as much as 15% of non-interest expenses on IT. A persistent finding of research into the performance of financial institutions is that performance and efficiency vary...

This paper examines the effects of two high-involvement approaches to organizing work in retail bank branches: worker discretion and cross-functional flexibility. Both discretion and flexibility have positive effects on productivity and sales effectiveness. The effects of discretion and...

The Internet has had a profound effect on the financial service sector, dramatically changing the cost and capabilities for marketing, distributing and servicing financial products and enabling new types of products and services to be developed. This is especially true for retail financial...

What determines vertical scope? Transactions cost economics (TCE) has been the dominant paradigm for understanding "make" vs. "buy" choices. However, the traditional focus on empirically validating or refuting TCE has taken attention away from other possible drivers of scope, and it has rarely...

"January 1994." "Revised June, 1993 and October, 1993; revision of Sloan School WP #3571-93"--Added t.p.

We investigate the hypothesis that the combination of three related innovations-1) information technology (IT), 2) complementary workplace reorganization, and 3) new products and services-constitute a significant skill-biased technical change affecting labor demand in the United States. Using...

We explore the effect of computerization on productivity and output growth using data from 527 large U.S. firms over 1987-1994. We find that computerization makes a contribution to measured productivity and output growth in the short term (using 1-year differences) that is consistent with normal...

Firms are increasingly implementing electronic distribution strategies to augment existing physical infrastructure for product and service delivery. However, to date there has been little systematic study on how these distribution channels affect customer profitability. In this study, we explore...

Includes bibliographical references (p. 23-25).

We explore the effect of computerization on productivity and output growth using data from 527 large US firms over 1987-1994. We find that computerization makes a contribution to measured productivity and output growth in the short term (using one year differences) that is consistent with normal...