IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/labeco/v15y2008i4p673-686.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do industries matter?

Author

Listed:
  • Sako, Mari

Abstract

This paper poses the question 'Do Industries Matter?' in order to shed light on what observation-based Industry Studies researchers can offer empirical economists using large-scale datasets. I argue that industries matter from three distinct perspectives. First, the methodological approach in Industry Studies adds value to economists' normal activity of testing and generating theory. Data collected using Industry Studies methods can lead to new ideas and theory-building. Second, industries matter as they provide an institutional and historical context in which to study firms and workers. Such context improves the interpretation of how and why different practices and institutions fit together in specific industries. Third, recognizing differences in what is meant by an industry improves our ability to interpret specific 'industry dummies' in regressions.

Suggested Citation

  • Sako, Mari, 2008. "Do industries matter?," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(4), pages 673-686, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:labeco:v:15:y:2008:i:4:p:673-686
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927-5371(07)00091-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. R. E. Caves & M. E. Porter, 1977. "From Entry Barriers to Mobility Barriers: Conjectural Decisions and Contrived Deterrence to New Competition," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 91(2), pages 241-261.
    2. Winter, Sidney G., 1984. "Schumpeterian competition in alternative technological regimes," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 5(3-4), pages 287-320.
    3. Edward P. Lazear, 2000. "Performance Pay and Productivity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(5), pages 1346-1361, December.
    4. Jaffe, Adam B, 1989. "Real Effects of Academic Research," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(5), pages 957-970, December.
    5. Cubbin, John & Geroski, Paul A, 1987. "The Convergence of Profits in the Long Run: Inter-firm and Inter-industry Comparisons," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(4), pages 427-442, June.
    6. Susan Helper, 2000. "Economists and Field Research: "You Can Observe a Lot Just by Watching."," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(2), pages 228-232, May.
    7. Schmalensee, Richard, 1985. "Do Markets Differ Much?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 75(3), pages 341-351, June.
    8. Klepper, Steven, 1997. "Industry Life Cycles," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 6(1), pages 145-181.
    9. Filipe M. Santos & Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, 2005. "Organizational Boundaries and Theories of Organization," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 16(5), pages 491-508, October.
    10. ANITA M. McGAHAN & MICHAEL E. PORTER, 1997. "How Much Does Industry Matter, Really?," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(S1), pages 15-30, July.
    11. Mari Sako, 2004. "Supplier development at Honda, Nissan and Toyota: comparative case studies of organizational capability enhancement," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 13(2), pages 281-308, April.
    12. Richard P. Rumelt, 1991. "How much does industry matter?," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(3), pages 167-185, March.
    13. Timothy J. Sturgeon, 2002. "Modular production networks: a new American model of industrial organization," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 11(3), pages 451-496, June.
    14. Mari Sako, 2006. "Outsourcing and Offshoring: Implications for Productivity of Business Services," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 22(4), pages 499-512, Winter.
    15. Richard R. Nelson, 1991. "Why do firms differ, and how does it matter?," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(S2), pages 61-74, December.
    16. Carliss Y. Baldwin & Kim B. Clark, 2000. "Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262024667, April.
    17. Coase, R H, 1988. "The Nature of the Firm: Origin," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 4(1), pages 3-17, Spring.
    18. Schmalensee, Richard, 1988. "Industrial Economics: An Overview," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 98(392), pages 643-681, September.
    19. Rosenberg,Nathan, 1994. "Exploring the Black Box," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521459556, September.
    20. Sako, Mari & Helper, Susan, 1998. "Determinants of trust in supplier relations: Evidence from the automotive industry in Japan and the United States," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 34(3), pages 387-417, March.
    21. Malerba, Franco & Orsenigo, Luigi, 1996. "The Dynamics and Evolution of Industries," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 5(1), pages 51-87.
    22. Morris M. Kleiner & Richard B. Freeman, 2000. "Who Benefits Most from Employee Involvement: Firms or Workers?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(2), pages 219-223, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Novaresio, Anna & Patrucco, Pier Paolo, 2023. "Innovation and trade in the automotive industry: evidence from European countries (1990-2018)," Department of Economics and Statistics Cognetti de Martiis. Working Papers 202306, University of Turin.
    2. Valeria Cirillo & Mario Pianta & Leopoldo Nascia, 2015. "The Dynamics of Skills: Technology and Business Cycles," LEM Papers Series 2015/30, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    3. Sofía Pérez de Guzmán & Esteban Martínez & Ester Ulloa, 2021. "Down but not out: Union strategies and power resources in response to liberalization and changes in national postal services – The cases of Spain and Belgium," European Journal of Industrial Relations, , vol. 27(4), pages 387-403, December.
    4. Valeria Cirillo & Mario Pianta & Leopoldo Nascia, 2018. "Technology and Occupations in Business Cycles," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(2), pages 1-25, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dosi, Giovanni & Nelson, Richard R., 2010. "Technical Change and Industrial Dynamics as Evolutionary Processes," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, in: Bronwyn H. Hall & Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 0, pages 51-127, Elsevier.
    2. Yi-Min Chen, 2008. "How Much Does Country Matter?," International Regional Science Review, , vol. 31(4), pages 404-435, October.
    3. Stoelhorst, J. W. & van Raaij, Erik M., 2004. "On explaining performance differentials: Marketing and the managerial theory of the firm," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 57(5), pages 462-477, May.
    4. Juan Carlos Bou & Albert Satorra, 2003. "The persistence of abnormal returns at industry and firm levels," Economics Working Papers 729, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    5. Michael G. Jacobides & C. Jennifer Tae, 2015. "Kingpins, Bottlenecks, and Value Dynamics Along a Sector," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 26(3), pages 889-907, June.
    6. Peneder, Michael, 2010. "Technological regimes and the variety of innovation behaviour: Creating integrated taxonomies of firms and sectors," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 323-334, April.
    7. Chen, Yi-Min, 2010. "The continuing debate on firm performance: A multilevel approach to the IT sectors of Taiwan and South Korea," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 63(5), pages 471-478, May.
    8. Leiponen, Aija & Drejer, Ina, 2007. "What exactly are technological regimes?: Intra-industry heterogeneity in the organization of innovation activities," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(8), pages 1221-1238, October.
    9. Baldwin, Carliss Y. & Bogers, Marcel L.A.M. & Kapoor, Rahul & West, Joel, 2024. "Focusing the ecosystem lens on innovation studies," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 53(3).
    10. Changhyun Kim & Richard A. Bettis, 2014. "Cash is surprisingly valuable as a strategic asset," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(13), pages 2053-2063, December.
    11. Eriksen, Bo & Knudsen, Thorbjorn, 2003. "Industry and firm level interaction: Implications for profitability," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 56(3), pages 191-199, March.
    12. Roller, Lars-Hendrik & Sinclair-Desgagne, Bernard, 1996. "On the heterogeneity of firms," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 40(3-5), pages 531-539, April.
    13. J. Vineesh Prakash & D. K. Nauriyal, 2020. "Automotive Components Industry and Profitability Factors: Evidence from India," Vision, , vol. 25(2), pages 209-223, June.
    14. Camisón, César & Forés, Beatriz, 2015. "Is tourism firm competitiveness driven by different internal or external specific factors?: New empirical evidence from Spain," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 477-499.
    15. Somohano Rodríguez, Francisco M. & López Fernández, José Manuel & Martínez García, Francisco Javier, 2018. "El efecto de la innovación en el resultado empresarial durante la recesión económica. Una aplicación a la industria de la automoción," Revista de Contabilidad - Spanish Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 91-105.
    16. Patricia M. Fairfield & Sundaresh Ramnath & Teri Lombardi Yohn, 2009. "Do Industry‐Level Analyses Improve Forecasts of Financial Performance?," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(1), pages 147-178, March.
    17. Luo, Jianxi, 2018. "Architecture and evolvability of innovation ecosystems," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 132-144.
    18. Pankaj Kumar & Xiaojin Liu & Akbar Zaheer, 2022. "How much does the firm's alliance network matter?," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(8), pages 1433-1468, August.
    19. Eduardo González-Fidalgo & Juan Ventura-Victoria, 2002. "How Much Do Strategic Groups Matter?," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 21(1), pages 55-71, August.
    20. J. Kapler, 2000. "Measuring the Economic Rate of Return on Assets," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 17(4), pages 457-463, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:labeco:v:15:y:2008:i:4:p:673-686. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/labeco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.