Big Data Investment, Skills, and Firm Value

Prasanna Tambe ()
Additional contact information
Prasanna Tambe: Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, New York 10012

Management Science, 2014, vol. 60, issue 6, 1452-1469

Abstract: This paper analyzes how labor market factors have shaped early returns on big data investment using a new data source---the LinkedIn skills database. The data source enables firm-level measurement of the employment of workers with technical skills such as Hadoop, MapReduce, and Apache Pig. From 2006 to 2011, Hadoop investments were associated with 3% faster productivity growth, but only for firms (a) with significant data assets and (b) in labor markets where similar investments by other firms helped to facilitate the development of a cadre of workers with complementary technical skills. The benefits of labor market concentration decline for investments in mature data technologies, such as Structured Query Language-based databases, for which the complementary skills can be acquired by workers through universities or other channels. These findings underscore the importance of geography, corporate investment, and skill acquisition channels for explaining productivity growth differences during the spread of new information technology innovations. This paper was accepted by Alok Gupta, special issue on business analytics .

Keywords: information systems; IT policy and management; economics of IS; strategic management of IT; management of IT human resources; Hadoop; big data; business analytics; technical skills; IT value; IT productivity; IT workforce (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (88)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1899 (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:ormnsc:v:60:y:2014:i:6:p:1452-1469

Access Statistics for this article

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