Research Note —Industry-Specific Human Capital and Wages: Evidence from the Business Process Outsourcing Industry

Keongtae Kim (), Sunil Mithas (), Jonathan Whitaker () and Prasanto K. Roy ()
Additional contact information
Keongtae Kim: College of Business, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Sunil Mithas: Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742
Jonathan Whitaker: Robins School of Business, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia 23173
Prasanto K. Roy: CyberMedia, New Delhi 110019, India

Information Systems Research, 2014, vol. 25, issue 3, 618-638

Abstract: Human capital is becoming more critical as the global economy becomes more information intensive and service intensive. Although information systems (IS) researchers have studied some dimensions of human capital, the role of industry-specific human capital has remained understudied. The information technology enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) industry provides an ideal setting to study returns to human capital, because jobs in this industry are standardized and many professionals in this new industry have come from other industries. We build on IS and economics literature to theorize returns to human capital in the BPO industry, and we test the theory using data for over 2,500 BPO professionals engaged in call center work and other nonvoice services (e.g., accounting, finance, human resources, etc.) in India during the 2006–2008 time period. We find higher returns to industry-specific human capital than to firm-specific and general human capital. We also find that junior-level professionals, whose jobs are relatively more standardized, have higher returns to industry-specific human capital than senior-level professionals. We discuss implications for further research and practice in the global economy where inter-industry transfers and migration of skills are becoming increasingly common.

Keywords: global disaggregation; globalization; services; industry; human capital; BPO; outsourcing; professionals; wages; compensation; industry-specific human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2014.0532 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orisre:v:25:y:2014:i:3:p:618-638

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Information Systems Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().