Human Resource Flow within Software Industry: A Firm-Level Investigation

In a knowledge-intensive industry such as information technology, human resource management plays a central role in the success of software firms. This study takes a firm-level analysis and examines the effects of the human resource inflows and outflows on software firm performance. Moreover, we investigate how the specific human capital variables (e.g. education, experience) embedded in the human resource flows affect firm performance. We collect a unique dataset from LinkedIn.com for the human resource flows and human capitals embedded. Our analysis shows that the human resource outflow but not inflow has significant impacts on firm performance. Meanwhile, the human capital variables such as education level and IT experience embedded in the human resource inflow have significant impacts on firm performance. Our study contributes to the research on IT turnover and IT human resource management by highlighting the importance of human capital embedded in the human resource flows. Our findings also suggest that researchers and practitioners should not only focus on the human resource inflow and outflow (i.e., quantity of the human resource flow), but also need to pay attention to the specific human capitals embedded in the flows (i.e., quality of the human resource flow)

Industry Classification Based on Labor Mobility Network Mining

Industry classification is important for industry analysis and competitive intelligence. However, existing schemes and methods are limited by the small number of industry categories and the lagged information of firms’ business. In this paper, we propose a novel industry classification method by constructing the labor mobility network from the LinkedIn profiles. We also propose a hierarchical extension of the community detection algorithm to better discover latent industry clusters on the constructed network. The evaluation conducted on real-world datasets shows that our method outperforms the best existing industry classification scheme and the state-of-the-art method and improves their explanatory power by 8.31% and 3.97% respectively. Moreover, our method is effective in earlier revealing firms’ action of entering new industries

Human Resource Flow and Software Firm Performance: The Role of Direct vs. Indirect Competitors

Recent years have witnessed increasingly stiff competition for talents among software firms. The economic impact of obtaining workers from or losing workers to competing firms, however, has rarely been quantified. Built on the literature of human resource flow and firm competition, this study examines the impact of human resource flows from and to different types of competitors on company performance. In particular, we divide competitors into direct and indirect competitors according to their market and resource similarity. Using a large dataset on labour mobility derived from LinkedIn.com, we quantify the impact of employees who came from or joined direct and indirect competitors respectively. We find that employees from competitors bring great benefits to the recipient firms. Specifically, a 1 percent increase of the number of employees from direct (indirect) competitors that join the focal company in the previous year increases the company’s economic value added by 0.054 (0.074) percent in the current year. Our results also contribute to the existing literature on human resources and company strategy and provide practical implications to recruiters and policy makers in the software industry

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FIRM PRODUCTIVITY: INVESTIGATING THE IMPACTS OF SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE MODEL AND WORKER MOBILITY

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Should I Buy Now, Pay Later? An Empirical Study of Consumer Behavior in E-Commerce

The Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) payment service in FinTech has rapidly gained popularity as a new payment option for consumers. However, its effect on consumer behavior remains unclear. This study investigates the effect of BNPL adoption on consumer purchase behaviors using a proprietary dataset from a large e-commerce platform. We find that BNPL adoption increases monthly spending by 11.2%, leads to a shift in purchase channel usage towards the mobile channel, and has a cannibalization effect on cash, debit cards, and credit cards payment methods. Our further analyses shed light on the mechanisms behind these effects. We find that the increased consumer spending as a result of BNPL adoption is driven by increased credit accessibility, mobile device ubiquity, and induced consumption effects. Our findings contribute to the growing body of literature on BNPL in FinTech and provide various practical implications for e-commerce and FinTech service operators

Winning over Grassroots Consumers: An Empowerment Perspective of Yu’E Bao

Recent years have witnessed the great potential of technological innovations in helping developing economies tackle financial exclusion, a key obstacle in reducing poverty and accelerating economic growth. Yet, the way that technology innovations should be designed and utilized to deliver inclusive finance has remained obscure. In this study, we undertook an in-depth qualitative case study of Yu’E Bao, an online market fund, which has revolutionized the online finance sector in China. The incredible feat of Yu’E Bao has made financial institutions in China start focusing on potential cumulative wealth of the large population of financially underserved “grassroots consumers”. Drawing insights from empowerment theory, we explicate the mechanisms through which an IT-enabled innovation can successfully engage and leverage the financially underprivileged population to progress towards financial inclusion. Our findings underline important theoretical, economic and societal contributions, viz. exploitation of empowerment mechanisms, acknowledgment of grassroots’ economic potential, and IT-enabled financial inclusion

Empowerment of Grassroots Consumers: A Revelatory Case of a Chinese Fintech Innovation

The recent emergence of financial technology (fintech) innovations offers a promising resolution to financial exclusion via mechanisms that empower financially underprivileged individuals to gain access rights in the traditional financial industry. However, academic research has provided little guidance on how to strategize the IT-enabled empowerment mechanisms for fintech innovations to realize both business success and financial inclusion. In this study, we conduct an in-depth revelatory case study on a novel Chinese fintech innovation, Yu’E Bao, a bellwether for the dramatic transformation of China’s financial industry through the successful empowerment of a large population of financially underprivileged individuals (i.e., “grassroots consumers,” translated from “cao gen” in Chinese). Through our systematic qualitative analysis of news articles collected since the product launch, we derive a two-stage theoretical model, examined through the lens of empowerment, and unravel the mechanisms underlying fintech innovation’s empowerment process on grassroots investment consumers. Most importantly, we elucidate a duality of empowerment through which the catalyst for Yu’E Bao’s success becomes an impediment to Yu’E Bao’s further development. Our study contributes to the literature on information technology-enabled empowerment, empowerment, and fintech. We also elucidate critical implications for various stakeholders, such as governments, policy makers, fintech practitioners, and product designers

Gender Difference in Competition Preference and Work Duration in the IT Industry: LinkedIn Evidence

Using the career histories from LinkedIn data, this paper investigates whether the gender difference in work duration is related to gender difference in preference for competition. We estimate a difference-in-difference model by using an exogeneous shock caused by the removing of “rank and yank” performance appraisal system in the US publicly listed firms, which clearly reduces the level of competition within an organization. We find that women have shorter work duration in the IT industry, a highly stressed industry. While, the removing of rank and yank system increases women’s work duration in the industry. This finding shows that the difference in preference for competition account for a significant share of the gender gap in work duration

Fighting Fire with Fire: The Use of an Auxiliary Platform to Address the Inherent Weaknesses of a Platform-Based Business

The success of different platform-based businesses has made it attractive for many firms to imitate their business model. While adopting a platform-based business model may generate numerous benefits, the inherent weaknesses of these models, such as unstandardized service quality, the burden of maintenance on resource owners, as well as the threat of multi-homing, have become apparent over time. Previous prescriptions for addressing these weaknesses, however, tended to solve the problem on only one side of the platform at the expense of another. Seeking an alternative solution, we conducted a case study of xBed, a successful accommodation-sharing platform in China. Based on our study, we constructed a preliminary model that illustrates how the aforementioned weaknesses can be overcome without compromising other stakeholders through the use of an auxiliary platform. Our findings also shed light on the advantages, deployment and nature of auxiliary platforms

Pandemics, global supply chains and local labor demand: evidence from 100 million posted jobs in China

This paper studies how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected labor demand, using over 100 million posted jobs on one of the largest online platforms in China. Our data reveal that the number of newly posted jobs within the first 14 weeks after the Wuhan lockdown on January 23, 2020, was about 31% lower than that of comparable periods in 2018 and 2019. We show that, via the global supply chain, COVID-19 cases abroad and pandemic-control policies by foreign governments reduced new-job creation in China by 11.7%. We also find that firms most exposed to international trade outperformed other firms at the beginning of the pandemic but underperformed during the recovery as the virus spread throughout the world