Employers repeatedly reevaluate their human capital investments when new technologies enter the market. Adopting new technologies can afford firms to achieve productivity gains (Schumpter 1942, Abernathy and Clark 1985, Anderson and Tushman 1990)...
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ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Standort Kiel
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Employers repeatedly reevaluate their human capital investments when new technologies enter the market. Adopting new technologies can afford firms to achieve productivity gains (Schumpter 1942, Abernathy and Clark 1985, Anderson and Tushman 1990) while offering workers the opportunity to update their skillsets on the job (Tambe et. al 2020). However, there are risks to both the employer and the worker as managers often struggle to invest in the appropriate innovations or match pace with the response to new technologies from workers (Cooper and Schendel 1976, Henderson 1993, Benner 2010). This dissertation addresses how employers can best adapt their technology strategies given the preferences of IT skilled workers. In the first chapter, we offer insight into the considerable heterogeneity in demand for technical skills across different employers, even within the same job role. We develop a model of investment in technology mix as a source of differentiation among employers' specific human capital where heterogeneity in the choice of technologies can arise in equilibrium based on heterogeneous employer characteristics. Using data on over 5 years of job vacancies, we characterize the technology choices made by over 1,700 employers. We find that large employers have greater investment into firm-specific technologies while also deriving more payoff from pursuing standard technologies. Smaller firms benefit more from firm-specific technologies but are constrained by more limited ability to invest. These results are unique to IT skills, and we do not find the same to hold for all skills in general.In the second chapter, we explore a case study of emerging technologies in the context of open-source software (OSS) sponsored by corporate entities. Corporate OSS informs on how employers manage potential external communities of talent. We create a novel dataset of open-source contribution records to study the effect of "star" developer contributions on corporate OSS projects and find that contributions by star developers result in about 52% more in contributions and 24% less in the hazard of becoming inactive on the GitHub social coding platform. Furthermore, projects benefit indirectly by incorporating external dependency packages with star contributions and are most successful when star contributions are paired with a team of supporters. These results suggest that open-source is a community inclined to a few highly influential actors rather than a crowd of anonymous contributors. Quantifying the influence of these stars have implications for how a platform can stimulate participation in certain areas of interest and which strategies companies can deploy for successfully engaging with the open-source community.In the third chapter, we derive a matching model between workers and employers based on their heterogeneous investments into a technology. Our model predicts the commonly observed positive assortative matching phenomenon wherein higher ability workers are matched to higher ability employers in equilibrium. Our model predicts that higher ability workers and firms are most susceptible to breaks in matching under a shifting technology frontier. We additionally find empirical evidence that higher ability firms more quickly change their skill requirements. These results have implications for understanding inequality in reskilling and retention of the workforce as they depend on the discrepancy in abilities between worker and employer.
