Cloud services and the performance of small firms
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Do cloud services boost small firms’ performance? Cloud services change a risky, fixed- cost investment in IT services to a variable-cost purchase of only IT services that have been used. As a result, cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon often advertise their products to small firms. However, cloud service has their own drawbacks for firms, such as the possibility of high costs due to unexpected high usage and changing prices by cloud service providers. This paper aims to answer whether the usage of cloud services improves the financial performance of small firms. Previous papers have limited their analysis to manufacturing plants, or have only been able to use survey or proxy data. In this paper, I use data from querying the website of small firms directly to find out whether they are using a cloud service technology as part of their IT infrastructure. This more direct dataset standardizes what is meant by a “cloud service” and focuses analysis on the impact of infrastructure cloud services, as opposed to the diverse array of cloud services more generally. Using a dataset of firms’ Amazon Web Service (AWS) usage and financial performance from 2000 and 2018, I run a difference-in-difference model to find the effect of using AWS on small firms’ revenue compared to larger firms’. I found that there is significant evidence that adopting AWS improves small firms’ revenue by as much as 60%, while adopting AWS appears to actually have a negative impact of large firms’ revenue.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 3, 2023 |
| Publication date | June 9, 2023; June 9, 2023 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Park, Julia |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Bresnahan, Timothy |
Subjects
| Subject | Cloud computing |
|---|---|
| Subject | Small business |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Park, J. (2023). Cloud services and the performance of small firms. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/js978wm1304. https://doi.org/10.25740/js978wm1304.
Collection
Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses
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- Contact
- julpark@stanford.edu
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