Title
Job Hopping, Information Technology Spillovers, and Productivity Growth
Abstract
The movement of information technology IT workers among firms is believed to be an important mechanism by which IT-related innovations diffuse throughout the economy. We use a newly developed source of employee microdata---an online resume database---to model IT workers' mobility patterns. We find that firms derive significant productivity benefits from the IT investments of other firms from which they hire IT labor. Our estimates indicate that over the last two decades, productivity spillovers from the IT investments of other firms transmitted through this channel have contributed 20%--30% as much to productivity growth as firms' own IT investments. Moreover, we find that the productivity benefits of locating near other IT-intensive firms can primarily be explained by the mobility of technical workers within the region. Our results are unique to the flow of IT workers among firms, not other occupations, which rules out some alternative explanations related to the similarity of firms that participate in the same labor flow network. This paper was accepted by Yu Jeffrey Hu, guest department editor, information systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1287/mnsc.2013.1764
Management Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
it spillovers,general-purpose technologies,regional growth,it labor,labor mobility,high-tech clusters,it value,productivity,agglomeration,industry clusters
Labor mobility,Information system,Flow network,Economics,Economies of agglomeration,Information technology,Microeconomics,Business cluster,Labour economics,It productivity,Productivity
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
60
2
0025-1909
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
17
1.01
17
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Prasanna Tambe117211.48
Lorin M. Hitt22426223.11