What drives differences in management practices?
Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten and John Van Reenen
Partnering with the US Census Bureau, we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in two waves of 35,000 manufacturing plants in 2010 and 2015. We fnd an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40 percent of this variation across plants within the same frm. Management practices account for more than 20 percent of the variation in productivity, a similar, or greater, percentage as that accounted for by R&D, ICT, or human capital. We fnd evidence of two key drivers to improve management. The business environment, as measured by right-to-work laws, boosts incentive management practices. Learning spillovers, as measured by the arrival of large "Million Dollar Plants" in the county, increases the management scores of incumbents. ? 2019 American Phytopathological Society. All rights reserved.
1 May 2019
American Economic Review 109(5) , pp.1648-1683, 2019
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/83600/
This Journal article is published under the centre's Growth programme.