Studies on IT, Logistics, and the Structure of Production
Date
2015-01-29
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Abstract
Information Technology (IT) has changed how firms and industries run their businesses and how they organize production. This thesis examines the relationships between IT and three important aspects of production organization: the usage of logistics outsourcing, the interde-dependence with upstream suppliers for intermediate inputs, and the structure of production in an economy. The first essay examines whether the advent of the Internet coincided with a move to the market in one of the most connected industries in the economy: logistics. We find that the effects of IT on outsourced logistics have changed with the advent of the Internet. The second essay examines the impact of an industry’s IT investment on its production interdependence with upstream suppliers, where we measure interdependence as direct backward linkage (DBL), and examines the relationship among DBL, total factor productivity (TFP), and value-added. We find that an industry’s IT investment reduces its production interdependence with suppliers and leads to greater value-added. The third essay explores the relationship between IT and the structure of production in an economy. We take a unique perspective, network analysis, to generate a variety of measures of the structure of production which we categorize as connectivity among industries in an ego-centric network and concentration in an ego industry’s supplying market. It is found that an industry’s IT investment is associated with an increase in the connectivity within its supplying network and a decrease in concentration in the supplying market.
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Business Administration--Management
Citation
Gong, F. (2015). Studies on IT, Logistics, and the Structure of Production (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27915