Final Thesis Hand in

Apologies for the belated blog spot I have been feverishly been putting the final touches on my thesis which I have just handed in FINALLY :)

I was planning on handing it in yesterday and attending the practice presentation that Dr.Calvo had assigned but an urgent personal matter had come up so I was not able to do either. I am very happy with the final quality of work which I have produced all up it was around 16,000-17,000 of quality writing. In the next few days I will be putting the final touches on my presentation in addition to studying for my final econometrics exam which happens to be the day after. As a result my final post will be on Tuesday evening of November 6th after my exam and presentaiton has been completed.

An overview of the contributions and achievements that my treatise has made are as follows:

The research problem undertaken was to explore the complementarities that the IT capital components of software and hardware capital exhibit with each other and other capital investments, as well as investigate their impact on productivity in an intensive IT using economy. This area has not yet been fully been explored by existing academia and will therefore broaden the knowledge and understating into this area for researchers, economists and businesses.
This treatise whilst a research treatise has provided some notable contributions which are:

1. One of the first papers to empirically model and prove that software capital and hardware capital are distinct capital components in production i.e. that hardware and software cannot be aggregated with each other nor with non-IT capital.
2. One of the first papers to apply the economic theory of complementarity and substitutability through the Allen Partial Elasticity Substitution (AES) measure to Australian data in IT productivity analysis.
3. The first paper to employ the AES framework using disaggregated IT capital i.e. software capital and hardware capital in IT productivity analysis
4. This treatise is also one of the first papers to provide evidence for the Australian economy not leveraging the entire benefits to be gained for IT investments and therefore in some respect indicate that Australia is an inefficient user of IT especially for software capital.