Productivity Program meeting.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings

The NBER's Productivity Program met in Cambridge on March 9. Program Director Ernst R. Bern& of MIT organized the meeting. The program was:

Sinan Aral, MIT; Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT and NBER; and Marshall Van Alstyne, Boston University, 'Information Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence"

Discussant: Susan Helper, Case Western Reserve University and NBER

Nick Bloom, Stanford University and NBER, "The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks: A Firm-Level Estimation and a 9/11 Simulation"

Discussant: Susanto Basu, Boston College and NBER

Timothy Erickson, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Ariel Pakes, Harvard University and NBER, "An Experimental Component Index for the CPI: From Annual Computer Data to the Monthly Data on Other Goods"

Discussant: Jack Triplett, Brookings Institution

James Adams, Rensselaer Polytechnic Insitute and NBER: Announcement of the NBER-RPI Scientific Papers Database

"Recent US Productivity Growth: A One-Time Blip or Sustainable?"--a panel discussion moderated by Ernst R. Berndt--presentations by: Kevin J. Stiroh, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Dale W. Jorgenson, Harvard University, "A Retrospective Look at the U.S. Productivity Growth Resurgence"; Daniel Sichel, Federal Reserve Board; Robert J. Gordon, Northwestern University and NBER, "Exploding Productivity Growth: Context, Causes, and Implication"; and Barry Bosworth and Jack Triplett, Brookdngs Institution, "The 21st Century Productivity Expansion Is STILL in Services"

Liran Einav, Stanford University and NBER, and Aviv Nevo, Northwestern University and NBER, "Errors in Self-Reported Data: A Cross-Validation of Homescan Data"

Discussant: Alvin J. Silk, Harvard University

In an effort to reveal the fine-grained relationships between IT use, patterns of information flows, and individual information-worker productivity, Aral, Brynjolfsson, and Alstyne study task-level practices at a midsize executive recruiting firm. They analyze both project-level and individual-level performance using: 1) detailed accounting data on revenues, compensation, project completion rates, and team membership for over 1300 projects spanning five years; 2) direct observation of over 125,000 e-mail messages over a period of ten months by individual workers; and 3) data on a matched set of the same workers' self-reported IT skills, IT use, and information sharing. These detailed data allow the researchers to econometrically evaluate a multistage model of production and interaction activities at the firm, and to analyze the relationships among key technologies, work practices, and output. They find that: IT use is positively correlated with non-linear drivers of productivity. Further, the structure and size of workers' communication networks are highly correlated with performance. There is also an inverted-U shaped relationship between multitasking and productivity such that, beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation. Finally, asynchronous...