Management Practice and Productivity

Nick Bloom, Stephen Dorgan, John Dowdy, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

The Centre for Economic Performance, McKinsey & Company and Stanford have developed an innovative new methodology to survey management practices in over 4,000 firms across Europe, the US and Asia. Analysing this data they demonstrate a surprisingly large dispersion in management practices across firms and nations, and an important role for competition, ownership and education in explaining these differences. They also find firms are surprisingly poor at self assessing their own management practices.

Launch Presentations

The full academic survey methodology, questionnaire (with examples) and results from the 2004 survey wave are contained in "Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries", by Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper 716 and forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 2007)

We would like to thank all those (anonymous) managers who participated in the survey. For further information please view our Management Interviews and Government Policy project site available at http://cep.lse.ac.uk/research/migp/default.asp

Details of our other work on management practices is available on the Management Practices website available at http://cep.lse.ac.uk/research/innovation/management.asp

This is funded by the Anglo-German Foundation and the ESRC.