Spillover effects of investment in big data analytics in B2B relationships: What is the role of human capital?

Economy-wide investment in Big Data Analytics (BDA) offers retailers a number of opportunities and while there is some evidence that new technologies have been widely adopted by retailers, it also transpires that many retailers have yet to fully exploit the benefits of BDA. Most research on Big Data and productivity (or performance) tends to focus on internal factors that prevent retailers from fully exploiting their investment in BDA. Research has paid scarce attention to the benefits that can accrue to the focal firm from the upstream investment in BDA and the features of the B2B marketing environment that may hamper (or enhance) these benefits. Unlike the previous literature, the paper tests the extent to which retailers, by having access to larger share of graduate workforce at regionally, can benefit more from inter-industry upstream investment in BDA than retailers located in areas where such workforce is scarce. Using data from ORBIS, KLEMS and QLFS, we show that retailers located in regions with a larger proportion of graduate workforce benefit more from inter-industry upstream investment in BDA as they tend to be more efficient on average. Equally, upstream investment in BDA is positively associated to frontier shifts over time (i.e. technical progress).