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With great sadness we have learnt that our good friend and colleague David Metcalf has passed away. Together with Richard Layard and Stephen Nickell, David set up the Centre for Labour Economics, which became the Centre ... Read more...
09 February 2026
John Van Reenen and Nick Bloom's study of management practices suggests that more than half of the productivity gap between Britain and the US is due to poor management. ... Read more...
31 January 2023
Nick Bloom in conversation on a surprising find from the pandemic: remote work is fuelling economic growth. ... Read more...
02 June 2022
Mental illness accounts for over 40 per cent of all sickness absence - reducing productivity at work. Richard Layard explains how this highlights the need for wellbeing provision in management practice. ... Read more...
11 May 2022
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake argue that capitalism can be revitalised by promoting ‘further investment’ in what they call ‘intangible capital’. ... Read more...
11 April 2022
Jonathan Haskel and Stain Westlake explain why the UK government's focus on funding overlooks many levers for innovation policy. ... Read more...
30 March 2022
John Van Reenen shows that well-managed firms make better forecasts - and the traits of those well-managed companies might come as a surprise. ... Read more...
02 February 2022
Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun and her colleagues have studied more than 12,000 companies and found that organizations that do the basic, boring work of managing - documenting processes, setting clear ... Read more...
05 November 2019
New research reports from the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics are highlighted in the Autumn 2019 CentrePiece magazine. As CEP approaches its thirtieth birthday in 202... Read more...
01 November 2019
A large empirical literature documents that the adoption of IT requires changes in the company organization and induces greater productivity gains in the best managed companies, because managerial and IT practices are co... Read more...
22 October 2019
Meanwhile, some studies suggest that research productivity is slowing down, so that it takes more scientists to glean each new insight across a variety of fields. Fighting this slowdown is a worthy goal, but a difficult... Read more...
03 October 2019
A new paper by economists Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen and Heidi Williams canvasses the principal policies that governments have used to nurture innovation. A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation, Nicholas Bloom... Read more...
20 September 2019
More structured managerial practices have a strong relationship with firm productivity, writes Daniela Scur. ... Read more...
09 September 2019
The study conducted by Christian Krekel, George Ward and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve tries to shed light on the relationship between well-being and company performance. ... Read more...
22 July 2019
This week's guest blog comes from Christian Krekel, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, working with George Ward from MIT Sloan and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve from Oxford Unive... Read more...
17 July 2019
Nicholas Bloom of Stanford made an analogy with a quite different arena: "Barcelona does not pick its team based on being born in Barcelona—if it did it would not win anything. The ECB should also pick the best." So to... Read more...
05 July 2019
The preeminent happiness researcher shares some surprising results on connecting well-being, mental health, and how employers can play a role in improving our lives at work. ... Read more...
01 July 2019
One of these efforts can be found in an article by economists Francesco Caselli and Alan Manning. Its mathematical model is quite flexible: it allows many types of workers and many different consumer and capital goods.... Read more...
23 June 2019
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22 June 2019
19 June 2019
18 June 2019
01 May 2019
Economists David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, Christina Patterson and John Van Reenen, who wrote one of the first papers to bring attention to the phenomenon of rising concentration, also endorse a story of so-calle... Read more...
26 April 2019
Less efficiency and lower profitability for firms carry lessons for Britain and the US, write Kilian Huber, Volker Lindenthal and Fabian Waldinger. Talented individuals are often excluded from leadership positions if th... Read more...
16 April 2019
A company's performance during and after a recession depends not just on the decisions it makes but also on who makes them. In a 2017 study, Raffaella Sadun (of Harvard Business School), Philippe Aghion (of College de Fr... Read more...
Snippet: Creating universities directly impacts the economic growth of the region Snippet: According to a study conducted by researchers at the London School of Economics in England and the Massachusetts Institute of T... Read more...
01 April 2019
Meanwhile, a very interesting new paper by economists Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Gilbert Cette, Remy Lecat and Helene Maghin looks at the relationship between credit constraints and productivity at the level of i... Read more...
27 March 2019
25 March 2019
By Nicholas Bloom Scott Ohlmacher Cristina Tello-Trillo Melanie Wallskog For 2010 and 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau fielded the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) in partnership with a research team of... Read more...
06 March 2019
A new study found that hospital prices paid by private insurers for inpatient and outpatient care grew much more quickly than the prices paid to the physicians who provide care in these settings. For all inpatient care, ... Read more...
18 February 2019
A new study looks at the long-run evolution of rent sharing between companies and workers in the UK and finds that rent sharing has significantly decreased between 2001 and 2016, particularly among companies that enjoy m... Read more...
08 February 2019
One little-known study could, however, help shed light on where the problem really lies. According to Professors Bell and Van Reenen of the LSE, the real issue is not that CEO pay has been inflated, but that worker pay h... Read more...
29 January 2019
John Van Reenen argues that competent managers are desperately undervalued in the UK. The MIT economics professor, who until recently headed the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance, concedes that most studies ... Read more...
08 December 2018
This report draws conclusions globally. For India, we understand there's been a lot of progress on improving allocative efficiencies. For many policy makers the next frontier is some of the capabilities which are interna... Read more...
26 November 2018
The danger of nepotism Professor John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thinks nepotism is a key risk. A 2011 study authored by Reenen, with Nicholas Bloom and Raffaella Sadun, found that those fa... Read more...
22 November 2018
Numerous studies by economists and others have underscored how hospital consolidation is driving up the cost of medical care. “Within the academic community, there is near unanimity,†said Zack Cooper, a health econo... Read more...
14 November 2018
John Van Reenen comments on whether executives in many industries are sold on the technical revolution. "There is a big debate on whether robots are really delivering on the productivity benefits they might promise." ... Read more...
09 November 2018
One problem in assessing the impact of management is that it is an amorphous and multifaceted category, including a variety of possible activities. This problem has been addressed by the work of economists lik... Read more...
07 July 2018
Recent studies show that scientific progress is decelerating and tends to stagnate on the whole. In the paper “Innovating Harder and Harder to Find?” published in March of this year, four economist... Read more...
24 May 2018
That daunting prospect has received some support from a new paper by economists Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb, entitled “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” They... Read more...
13 May 2018
Pointing out the weaknesses of the small business, Professor Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues developed a survey instrument for measuring business quality. According to the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Ind... Read more...
02 May 2018
The scary idea is that easy-to-discover technology is a finite, exhaustible resource. … That daunting prospect has received some support from a new paper by economists Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, ... Read more...
One study suggests incompetent managers are at the root of poor performance issues in UK offices, with 96% of the 800 HR professionals surveyed citing performance management as a problem at their organisation.... Read more...
30 April 2018
But beyond just the numbers, the onset of globalization and its impact on international finance and global commerce has forced American business schools to seek new ways to burnish their “international&r... Read more...
25 April 2018
And academics at the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE looked at the relationship between marginal seats and hospital closures between 1997 and 2005. They found “Marginality…has a significant... Read more...
19 April 2018
BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Organizations need competent management just as much as they need analytical brilliance, argue the winners of this year’s HBR McKinsey Award, which honors the best Harvard Busine... Read more...
17 April 2018
Harvard Business School associate professor Raffaella Sadun and coauthors Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and John Van Reenen of MIT have been named the first-place winners of the 59th Annual HBR McKinse... Read more...
SWINDON, United Kingdom – The Economic and Social Research Council(ESRC) has announced that the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC), the What Works Centre for Loca... Read more...
16 April 2018
The Economic and Social Research Council is delighted to announce that the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC), the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth Centre (L... Read more...
Nudge-u-cation: Can behavioural science boost education and social mobility? Pro Bono Economics' Annual Lecture featuring Dr David Halpern, Professor Sandra McNally and Chris Brown. Over the last decade, g... Read more...
11 April 2018
Today for the first time, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is to recognise its global centres of excellence with official ESRC Research Institute status. The move acknowledg... Read more...
09 April 2018
Once again, I’m brooding over science’s limits. I recently posted Q&As with three physicists with strong opinions on the topic--David Deutsch, Marcelo Gleiser and Martin Rees--as well as this c... Read more...
07 April 2018
Article by Nicholas Bloom, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie and John Roberts. In our recent research, we examine the persistence of an intensive management intervention carried out in India (Bloom et ... Read more...
29 March 2018
All in the Family? CEO Choice and Firm Organization, by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, is the first study showing a causal link between dynastic family firms and poorer ... Read more...
01 March 2018
Anna Valero interviewed, speaking about the big picture of UK productivity: low investment, bad training, bad management and lack of infrastructure. BBC business correspondent Jonty Bloom... Read more...
05 February 2018
A decade ago, economists at Berkeley, Stanford and the World Bank conducted a randomised trial in which the bank paid for some textile factories in Mumbai to receive consulting advice from a global company. Th... Read more...
02 February 2018
To sustain economic growth, the United States must double its overall research effort every 13 years. That’s because it is taking an increasing amount of effort to generate enough ideas to power the econ... Read more...
Swati Dhingra has been awared a European Research Council Starting Grant for the BIGlobal project, which will examine the sources of firm growth and market power to provide new insights into welfare and policy... Read more...
01 February 2018
Article by John Van Reenen A 15-year survey of 12,000 firms across 34 countries shows that management practices explain a large share of productivity gaps. Income differences between rich and poor countries... Read more...
18 January 2018
Anna Valero, Beverley Skeggs, Connson Locke, Emily Jackson, Shani Orgad, Sonia Livingstone and Susanna Khavul Budget 2017: productivity is the focus, but ‘fixes’ are unlikely to be enough ... Read more...
26 December 2017
College leaders' effectiveness 'seems unrelated to their salary', according to the Centre for Vocational Education Research. Better principals make a positive difference to their student’s ed... Read more...
19 December 2017
Article by Jennifer Ruiz-Valenzuela, Camille Terrier and Clémentine Van Effentererre Principal quality matters for educational performance, argue researchers from the Centre for Vocational Education ... Read more...
John Van Reenen, an economist at MIT and another of the “Ideas” paper’s authors, has performed studies that look at talent cultivation in the U.S. by trying to determine the likelihood of som... Read more...
15 December 2017
Work from home or go to an office: which kind of workers are happier and more efficient? For the first time – surprisingly – there’s some solid academic research on the subject, led by a Stan... Read more...
14 December 2017
The skepticism about future growth potential is becoming international. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom recently pointed out that innovation as a growth engine has become increasingly costly. "What worr... Read more...
05 December 2017
The four UK Higher Education Funding Bodies have announced the appointment of the chairs of the 34 sub-panels for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. ... Read more...
01 December 2017
Economists have a hard time explaining why productivity growth has been shrinking. One theory: true innovation has gotten much harder – and much more expensive. So what should we do next? John V... Read more...
29 November 2017
We’ve picked all the low hanging fruit when it comes to new ideas, and the world is set for more parsimonious times. This is the idea put forward in a recent research paper by Nicholas Bloom, John Van Re... Read more...
23 November 2017
In Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (NBER Working Paper No.23782), Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb argue that, to maintain a given rate of economics growth, resources devote... Read more...
10 November 2017
Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb show through detailed analysis of firms that research productivity is declining even as research efforts are rising. One of their key findings: &... Read more...
30 October 2017
The standard metric of monopoly power is the concentration ratio, or the share of the market accruing to the top four (or 20) firms. In a 2017 paper, MIT’s David Autor, Christina Patterson, and John Van ... Read more...
26 October 2017
…there have been numerous studies claiming that better management – sometimes equated with more management – is the key to productivity. One in particular – done by economists in Stanf... Read more...
Modern-day inventors–even those in the league of Steve Jobs–will have a tough time measuring up to the productivity of the Thomas Edisons of the past. That’s because big ideas are getting har... Read more...
20 October 2017
Article by John Van Reenen. When people discuss what drives long-run productivity, they usually focus on technical change. But productivity is about more than robots, new drugs and self-driving vehicles.... Read more...
18 October 2017
UK economic performance has been poor since the vote to leave the EU in June 2016, but has not been the catastrophe that many predicted. Nicholas Bloom (Stanford) and Paul Mizen (Nottingham University) dr... Read more...
17 October 2017
Awarded an European Research Council Proof of Concept Grant for the NCore project, which aims to develop a mobile app which facilitates access to mental health services and treatments for young peopl... Read more...
12 October 2017
A 2015 study by Stanford University’s Nicholas Bloom and others on management practices across 1,800 high schools in eight countries, including India, showed that better management produced better educat... Read more...
05 October 2017
A growing body of research shows the role that school leaders play at influencing student outcomes. After studying headmasters in India and abroad, Stanford University Professor Nick Bloom and his colleag... Read more...
04 October 2017
"Ideas, and in particular the exponential growth they entail, are getting harder and harder to find," according to a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States. The... Read more...
03 October 2017
But the exploitation of currently available knowledge is far from complete A recent paper by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb of Stanford University, and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts I... Read more...
29 September 2017
There may come a whole range of inventions that we can hardly imagine today. Already existing innovations also need some time to affect productivity in production chains. This concerns robotics and a range of ... Read more...
27 September 2017
A new working paper at the NBER looks into the productivity of research effort, that is, how research effort correlates with an increase in output. ‘Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find‘, authored by N... Read more...
26 September 2017
Over the last decade, economists have worked hard on the impact of management on productivity. The effectiveness of management, measured by a set of indicators (quality of internal monitoring, setting clear ob... Read more...
British companies are increasingly concerned that Brexit will hit sales and raise costs, according to a survey backed by the Bank of England. Tracking the views of chief executives and chief financial officers... Read more...
25 September 2017
Nicholas Bloom, a SIEPR senior fellow and co-author of a paper released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, contends that so many game-changing inventions have appeared since World War II th... Read more...
And if your boss is on the fence, here’s a compelling case study — from economics professor Nicholas Bloom — to show her. Imagine a person working from home. If you pictured somebody in pajam... Read more...
20 September 2017
Article by John Van Reenen: What are the costs and benefits of regulation? Most countries treat smaller firms more generously when it comes to business regulation, exempting them from some of the burdens on la... Read more...
Article by Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb: The rate of productivity growth in advanced economies has been falling. Optimists hope for a fourth industrial revolution, while p... Read more...
A fascinating new paper by Nicholas Bloom and colleagues at Stanford and MIT has created waves by claiming that ideas are getting harder to find, which implies that many more researchers are needed to maintain... Read more...
17 September 2017
14 September 2017
…the “dearth of new ideas” thesis still resonates. A new paper from Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, Michael Web and MIT’s John Van Reenen examines this particular aspec... Read more...
A team of top boffins is starting to worry that humans are running out of ideas and are citing the tech industry’s inability to come up with a solution for Moore's Law as a case study. Economic resea... Read more...
13 September 2017
To what extent does the quality of management matter for a business to be successful? ask Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten and John Van Reenen ... Read more...
Research just isn’t as effective as it used to be In a paper published Monday through the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?", economics professors Nich... Read more...
11 September 2017
By Raffaella Sadun, Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen In MBA programs, students are taught that companies can’t expect to compete on the basis of internal managerial competencies because they’r... Read more...
23 August 2017
As has become the tradition for our last post of the academic year, we’re featuring summer reading recommendations from special people at LSE. This year, two winners of the LSESU Teaching Excellence Awar... Read more...
26 June 2017
A study of professors Luis Garicano and Vicente Cuñat, of the London School of Economics, established in 2009, a relationship between a higher degree of politicization, less experience and a lower acade... Read more...
Encouraging better work-life balance does not lead to higher productivity, academics at London School of Economics found. Neither does forcing workers into miserable servitude. Related publications &lsqu... Read more...
“Just as the US military has become more decentralized, letting soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq make more decisions than they would have in Korea or in Vietnam, so are the best firms decen... Read more...
07 June 2017
17 May 2017
Article by Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynfolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta Eksten and John Van Reenen Disentangling the relationship between management practices and productivity ha... Read more...
Article by John Van Reenen. Managers are more frequently the butt of jokes from TV shows like “The Office” to “Horrible Bosses,” than seen as drivers of growth. But maybe things ar... Read more...
09 May 2017
Article by Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten and John Van Reenen Our analysis of the Census data, conducted with Lucia Foster and Ron Jarmin of the U.S. Census Bureau and... Read more...
18 April 2017
Children with graduate nursery teachers achieve only slightly more by the end of Reception than children with unqualified teachers Children who have access to a qualified teacher at nursery school do only s... Read more...
13 February 2017
The World Wellbeing Panel agrees that every effort should be made to reduce middle management, write Nick Powdthavee and Paul Frijters. Workers’ satisfaction with their job is, on average, higher in ... Read more...
30 January 2017
And it isn't "infrastructure" Improving our management skills is part of this. John van Reenen at the London School of Economics has written about how the quality of management in different co... Read more...
25 January 2017
Snippet: ...Mention of LSE research on productivity in UK compared to productivity in France and Germany ... that LSE researchers suggest that by Thursday lunchtime the other countries have produced... Read more...
23 January 2017
A study published in 2011 examined CEOs in the top-100 best hospitals in USNWR in three key medical specialties: cancer, digestive disorders, and cardiovascular care. A simple question was asked: are hospitals... Read more...
27 December 2016
Economists Nicholas Bloom of Stanford and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (along with several co-authors) have been compiling evidence for a while now that companies that follow ma... Read more...
21 December 2016
Skills policies would ideally be co-ordinated with the government’s proposed new industrial strategy. “In the long-run, skills are really important for growth,” said Stephen Machin, co-chair ... Read more...
21 November 2016
Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia affect huge numbers of people - a third of all over-80s have some form of dementia, estimates the US CDC. This has two key effects. Firstly, Alzheimer's is a major killer in its o... Read more...
23 September 2016
A paper by Nicholas Bloom and others, from Stanford University, finds that well-managed firms perform better than their peers and make a greater contribution to a nation's total-factor productivity. ... Bloom and colleag... Read more...
18 September 2016
For the past decade, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and a rotating crew of co-authors (most consistently MIT's John Van Reenen) have been documenting that the management best practices developed at high-performing com... Read more...
22 August 2016
By Brian Bell, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, and John Van Reenen Director of the Centre for Economic Performance and Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. Originally published at VoxEU... Read more...
08 August 2016
Brian Bell and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance have carried out a similar exercise looking at top bosses' pay at 500 large listed UK companies between 1999 and 2014. Unl... Read more...
27 July 2016
This finding is mirrored at least in part by a study of sponsored academies established under the previous Labour government, conducted by the London School of Economics, which argues that the impact of conversion should... Read more...
22 July 2016
A feedback cycle has businesses cautious on investment and consumers unwilling to spend In a 2015 working paper, the economists Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis constructed Economic Policy Uncertainty... Read more...
21 July 2016
And if income inequality were not related to our kind, our ethnicity or our level of education, but rather to our workplace? Some employers pay better than others. And the gap between those who pay well and those who pay... Read more...
The evidence is that foreign managers improve the companies they acquire A paper by Nick Bloom of Stanford University and others shows that the David Brents can learn from the Jack Welches: when they take over British f... Read more...
20 July 2016
A bad few days for the image of Britain's retail sector PARLIAMENTARY committees are normally sleepy affairs. Backbench MPs get the chance to grill the occasional bigwig. By replying to questions succinctly witnesses ty... Read more...
11 June 2016
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of economic inequality has been the role that firms play in it. It's safe to say that a significant part of the growing gap in how well different firms pay can be attributed to the lat... Read more...
11 May 2016
If you're reading this you probably don't need convincing, but one of the most significant milestones in economic research over the last several years was documenting empirically that it really is true. A new paper buil... Read more...
11 April 2016
The article is an in depth summary of Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen's research on the difference in management practices. Ideally, this summary highlights the key points of focus as established by the authors. Th... Read more...
07 April 2016
A new RISE working paper, describing the development of an expanded survey tool, presents research findings that could be used to help systematically measure management practices in schools in developing countries, and p... Read more...
05 April 2016
Amy Mollett, Social Media Manager, rounds up how LSE currently uses Twitter for sharing research, interacting with students and alumni, and promoting events. She also looks at what the future of academic social media mig... Read more...
24 March 2016
Weekly recommendations include: On the LSE Business Review blog, work by Nguyen and Van Reenen using an RDD to show that tax credits increased R&D spending and innovation among SMEs in the UK. The item was published by... Read more...
18 March 2016
Scholars who have read the paper say it makes a valuable contribution to the field. The model ''is stylized but rich enough, I think, to capture some of the main features of the sector,'' explains John Van Reenan, an eco... Read more...
15 March 2016
John Van Reenen discusses why wages aren't growing. The interview was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 News on March 13, 2016 Link to interview here Also ran on BBC World Service Linda Yueh interview John Van Reenen discus... Read more...
13 March 2016
''In the last seven to eight years, wage growth has been very disappointing in the world,'' says John Van Reenen, director of the Center for Economic Performance of the London School of Economics (LSE). This article was... Read more...
12 March 2016
According to studies conducted by John Van Reenen, director at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science, differences in productivity between other countries and the US c... Read more...
11 March 2016
Management is thought to play a key role in explaining this gap. In 2012, the results of a decade-long worldwide study carried out by academics at Stanford, Harvard and the LSE found the UK had more badly managed firms t... Read more...
03 March 2016
The UK is still some way off solving the productivity puzzle after final estimates for 2014 from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that productivity was 18 percentage points lower than the average for the r... Read more...
18 February 2016
There is an overall increase in new companies for a range of reasons. One reason has certainly been the economic downturn, which has resulted in people having difficulty find a job and turning to entrepreneurship, accord... Read more...
21 January 2016
Results from the Centre for Economic Performance study in March 2015 suggest deregulation of Sunday trading laws has a considerable positive impact on employment, which stems from new firms being able to enter the mark... Read more...
16 January 2016
A recent study by Zack Cooper, Stuart Craig, Martin Gaynor, and John Van Reenen has documented the remarkable variations across regions and age groups, and within regions, in U.S. health care spending. Previously, the Da... Read more...
30 December 2015
The cost of medical care varies widely across the United States, a new study reports. Hospitals negotiate the cost of medical services with insurance companies. And, the new report found that prices at hospitals in monop... Read more...
26 December 2015
3. New data shows experts were wrong about where healthcare costs less Researchers analyzed the real prices hospitals negotiate with private insurers and found places that spend less on Medicare do not necessarily spend... Read more...
18 December 2015
Article by Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur and John Van Reenen There is a long history of debate within business, policy, and economic literature regarding whether firms can improve their performance by tr... Read more...
Article by David Metcalf Would it be sensible to fill vacancies by attracting extra nurses from outside of the EU? These are the main questions the home secretary asked the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to examine ... Read more...
16 December 2015
A new ''Big Data'' project from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics demonstrates that the prices hospitals negotiate with private ... Read more...
The cost insurance companies pay for a medical operation in a hospital varies dramatically from city to city within the U.S. and can even vary by a factor of nine within an individual city, according to new research. The... Read more...
15 December 2015
Health care is among the largest sectors of the U.S. economy and accounted for more than 17 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2014. About 60 percent of the U.S. population has private health insurance, which pay... Read more...
Commercial health plans that cover workplace benefits for millions of Americans pay higher prices to hospitals that have little or no competition, according to a new study that raises questions about how to slow U.S. hea... Read more...
Economists at Yale, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics have released a paper that shows vast differences in charges for hospital procedures across the country. Unlike some... Read more...
Three of the nation's largest insurance companies - Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealth - have let researchers have a look at the negotiated prices they pay for services and procedures like C-sections, MRIs and hospital sta... Read more...
The prices hospitals negotiate with health insurance companies vary enormously within and across geographic regions in the United States, according to a new study coauthored by a Yale economist. ... ''Virtually everythin... Read more...
According to the report, titled ''The Price Ain't Right? Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured,'' information collected on Medicare has largely impacted the country's health-care policy as data on ... Read more...
While many studies have shown that Medicare gets a good deal in Rochester, Duluth and Minneapolis, new work from four economists suggests that private insurers in those cities pay noticeably more for care. This article ... Read more...
Researchers have compiled data on $682 billion worth of claims to look at the truth behind medical costs. This article was published online by Marketplace.org on December 15, 2015 Link to article here Related publi... Read more...
Hospitals that face fewer competitors have considerably higher prices, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economi... Read more...
... But a new study casts doubt on that simple message. The research looked not only at Medicare but also at a huge, new database drawn from private-insurance plans - the sorts used by most Americans for health care. And... Read more...
The Economist quoted a study by John Van Reenen, director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, which conducted 14,000 interviews and discovered that UK employees score their bosses le... Read more...
04 December 2015
THE low productivity of British workers has several possible culprits. Inefficient family-run companies are sometimes blamed, as are poor workforce skills. But whereas these problems are well documented, another factor i... Read more...
28 November 2015
Money should follow patients and they need information and choice, write Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen In work with Carol Propper and Stephan Seiler, we evaluate whether competition improves hospital quality, in pa... Read more...
25 November 2015
Anna Valero suggests ways to deal with deficits in skills, infrastructure and innovation. This article was published online by the LSE Business Review blog on 23 November, 2015 Link to article here Related publicati... Read more...
23 November 2015
John Van Reenen, director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, has studied some of the less high-profile strategies employed by companies that are successful over the long term. This... Read more...
11 November 2015
John Van Reenen, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, joins us to discuss the economics of management, productivity, and information technology. Li... Read more...
09 November 2015
John Van Reenen interviewed about the economics of management, productivity, and information technology. This interview was broadcast by Economic Frontiers on November 9, 2015 Link to article here Related Publicati... Read more...
A third FE research centre has launched just a year after Professor Lady Alison Wolf decried how the sector was ''woefully short of good, up-to-date research''. ... The work of the new centre, said Mr Grainger, would co... Read more...
05 October 2015
We already have two sets of pioneering work being undertaken in the UK to address this very problem. One is the JPMorgan Foundation funded work at the Institute of Public Policy Research working with US business Burning ... Read more...
30 September 2015
Henry Overman interviewed by Philip Salter It's easy to make policy, but it's hard to make the right ones. These are the sorts of questions the excellent What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth looks at. It recently... Read more...
25 September 2015
That time difference adds 2.6 percent extra productivity for the professionals, finds an LSE-Columbia-Harvard team. An emerging body of evidence indicates that family management may actually be detrimental for performan... Read more...
14 September 2015
Leaders could also test whether specific work conditions or policies affect workers' performance. ... Nick Bloom of Stanford University and his colleagues conducted a randomized experiment on working from home using a NA... Read more...
20 August 2015
Article by John Van Reenen Unlike most commentators I have actually read Corbyn's ''The Economy in 2020'' as well as the 1983 manifesto. Corbyn's document has several major advantages. First, at 8 pages it is much short... Read more...
15 August 2015
Stanford economics professor Nicholas A. Bloom explains how Alphabet will make investors comfortable: ''There are two benefits of the new structure. One is visibility, in that with the split it makes it easier to model t... Read more...
13 August 2015
Consider a paper presented at the Summer Session of the National Bureau of Economic Research by Raj Chetty, Bloomberg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, ''Innovation Policy and the Lifecycle of Inventors.'' (T... Read more...
10 August 2015
A society where more workers got to use the duvet office would be a happier, more productive one In 2014, Stanford University academics compared the performance of remote employees to those in the office at Ctrip, China... Read more...
05 August 2015
Those of us who have run hospitals where we've been serious about achieving improvements in quality and safety know that without a highly committed board of trustees, the results will never be sustainable. And so it is l... Read more...
03 August 2015
Article by Anna Valero In the 2015 summer budget, George Osborne at last identified the UK's productivity performance as an important issue that needs to be tackled. Here, Anna Valero reviews some of the measures ahea... Read more...
09 July 2015
Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muuls, Laure B. De Preux and Ulrich J. Wagner have received the 2015 Erik Kempe Award for their paper 'Industry Compensation Under Relocation Risk: A Firm-Level Analysis of the EU Emissions Trading... Read more...
29 June 2015
Texas-universitetet om studien som er publisert av Centre for Economic Performance ved London School of Economics and Political Science. - Mobiltelefoner kan være forstyrrende, legger han til ... Mobile prohibition gav... Read more...
24 June 2015
Professor Nicholas Bloom from the Department of Economics at Stanford University, with his graduate student James Liang, conducted an interesting experiment at Chinese travel website Ctrip's call center. Employees could ... Read more...
18 June 2015
Quality of leadership determines student achievement There is a clear link between management quality and students' academic achievements. It shows an international research study of 1,800 schools in eight countries. Ad... Read more...
12 June 2015
Article by Nicholas Bloom and Renata Lemos There is a clear link between management quality and students' academic achievements. It shows an international research study by Stanford Professor Nicholas Bloom in collabora... Read more...
11 June 2015
In fact, according to academics at the London School of Economics, the effect of banning mobile phones from school premises adds up to the equivalent of an extra week's schooling across the academic year. This artic... Read more...
10 June 2015
That a ban on mobile phone use by pupils in schools may be quite useful, has now been proven by Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy on behalf of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.... Read more...
04 June 2015
Marco Manacorda filmed giving a talk at the Festival of Economics on Trento. There is abundant anecdotal evidence but poor empirical evidence of the benefits enjoyed by the relatives of politicians in the labor market. ... Read more...
02 June 2015
Having a politician relative adds an average of 500 euros a year to one's salary, according to a new study by two Italian economists. This is equal to a 3 percent increase in an average paycheck. In comparison, every a... Read more...
Last month, a study from the London School of Economics for the first time provided hard evidence that banning phones in school boosts student achievement. ''Mobile phones now are a ubiquitous part of a teenager's life''... Read more...
01 June 2015
Corporate greed isn't good, but it might not be as bad for inequality as we thought - or at least not in the way we thought. Now it seems pretty obvious that inequality must have something to do with executive pay. After... Read more...
29 May 2015
Anna Sivropoulos-Valero interviewed on productivity. The interview was broadcast by BBC Radio 4's More or Less Programme on May 29, 2015 Link to interview here [Interview begins around 08:24.] Related publications ... Read more...
BANNING mobile phones in the classroom can boost test scores by more than 6 per cent, according to a new study. Researchers at the London School of Economics looked at secondary schools in four English cities, including... Read more...
26 May 2015
It may seem like common sense that keeping smartphones away from kids would improve their performance at school. Now a study by the London School of Economics has the data to back it up. ... ''By surveying schools in fou... Read more...
20 May 2015
As Pret a Manger becomes the latest company to credit happy workers for improved profits, we examine the evidence that suggests smiling employees might keep the tills ringing. There is a slight problem with anecdotal ev... Read more...
22 April 2015
According to one academic paper, about a quarter of Britain's productivity gap with America can be put down to poor management. The main weakness is that too many of Britain's family-owned firms still prefer primogenitur... Read more...
11 April 2015
... go away'', said David Marsden, an expert in employee relations at the London School of Economics. How management deals with the current tragedy could affect the tenor of future talks, said ... This article was p... Read more...
30 March 2015
New research from a group of economists at Harvard, the Treasury Department, and the London School of Economics provides a particularly vivid illustration of how disadvantage can harm the economy at large. The researcher... Read more...
16 March 2015
Why Brazil produces fewer world-class companies than it should A big reason for Brazilian firms' underperformance is less well rehearsed: poor management. Since 2004 John van Reenen of the London School of Economics and... Read more...
28 February 2015
In a recent article in McKinsey Quarterly John Dowdy, a director of McKinsey, and John van Reenen, an economics professor and director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, argue that ... Read more...
25 February 2015
Competition among hospitals is linked to better quality management and lower death rate, suggests research published in The Review of Economic Studies. But competition on quality rather than price is likely to be key, sa... Read more...
30 January 2015
Research by the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance was published in The Review of Economic Studies and involved 61% of all NHS providers of acute care in England. The study shows that adding one extra hospital in a ne... Read more...
29 January 2015
As David Cameron lambasts Ed Miliband for allegedly wanting to ''weaponise'' the National Health Service in the election, new research gives the UK prime minister some ammunition of his own. LSE economists have measured ... Read more...
The Labour Party believes in reforming the NHS as much as in spending more taxpayers' money on it, and that the more independent providers of NHS services the better, if they can do a good job. ... It is also worth notin... Read more...
During Tuesday's State of the Union address, President Barack Obama announced his plan to expand paid leave for workers, starting with the federal government. Even with three months available to them, few Americans can t... Read more...
21 January 2015
Why have the number of startups increased? The economic downturn has led to the rise in the number of startups over recent years, says John Van Reenen, director at the Centre for Economic Performance and professor of ... Read more...
19 January 2015
Article by Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen Schools with greater autonomy often perform well, but there is disagreement over whether this is due to better management or cherry-picking of students. Bas... Read more...
07 December 2014
Article by Paul Dolan Being happy at work is important. Studies suggest that if you're not happy at work, you're less productive, more likely to take days off sick, and a poor problem solver. Still, some people mainta... Read more...
20 November 2014
It is generally agreed that firms can improve their employees' wellbeing through improvements in job quality - but is it in their economic interests to do so? This column reports research showing that satisfied employee... Read more...
17 November 2014
Depuis plus d'une dizaine d'annees, une equipe de chercheurs reunie autour de Nicholas Bloom (professeur a Stanford) et John Van Reenen (professeur a la London School of Economics) etudie l'influence des techniques de ma... Read more...
12 November 2014
Zack Cooper discusses whether US efforts to reform health care could mean a loss of medical innovation for the rest of the world. This interview was broadcast on Public Radio International on November 7, 2014 Link to... Read more...
07 November 2014
Nick Bloom and his colleagues studied 700 firms around the world. ''We find more productive, faster growing and better managed firms offer their employees a more attractive work-life balance package'', Bloom said in an e... Read more...
23 October 2014
Studies show that fears about remote workers being 'untrustworthy' and less productive are unfounded; a 2013 study by the London School of Economics and Political Science found that employees able to work from home are m... Read more...
16 October 2014
Article by John Dowdy and John Van Reenen While government policy will play a key role, the actions of managers and their organizations will decisively influence the realization of global productivity potential in the y... Read more...
30 September 2014
Professor John Van Reenen, Department of Economics and Centre for Economic Performance, has been awarded the European Investment Bank Institute's 2014 'Outstanding Contribution Award'. The accolade, jointly awarded to Pr... Read more...
28 July 2014
In the UK, the Economic and Social Research Council does fund management and business research (such as the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics). In 2013-14, it funded two projects in this a... Read more...
24 July 2014
The EIB Institute announces that this year's 'Outstanding Contribution Award' - with a prize of EUR 40,000 - will go jointly to Professors Nicholas Bloom (Department of Economics, Stanford University) and John Van Reenen... Read more...
22 July 2014
Progress means putting the old out of business. Mention of LSE researchers in 1993 who ran the world's first conference on a new topic - an economic explanation for happiness. This article was published by the Time... Read more...
26 June 2014
Mention of LSE's research on dementia. The research was mentioned on BBC Radio 4 News on June 19, 2014 Related Links Martin Knapp webpage Wellbeing webpage ... Read more...
19 June 2014
"We owe it to the 44 million people living with dementia across the world to find new treatments for this cruel condition. But with the latest research from the London School of Economics now showing that a treatmen... Read more...
In 2013, Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues published a study they ran with Ctrip, a Chinese travel agency. Bloom et al conducted a randomised controlled trial with employees from the company's call centres. One group of ... Read more...
06 June 2014
Com'è la giornata tipo di un manager nel mondo? Quante ore lavora e cosa fa in quelle ore? Uno studio su amministratori delegati europei, americani, indiani e brasiliani condotto da Raffaella Sadun (che insegna Bu... Read more...
03 June 2014
Johtajuus voi selittaa neljanneksen tai jopa kolmanneksen eroista kokonaistuottavuudessa maiden ja yritysten valilla. Taloustieteilijoiden Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur ja John Van Reenen tu... Read more...
22 May 2014
In 2010, the US Census Bureau conducted the first large-scale survey of management practices in America, gathering data on more than 30,000 manufacturing plants. Nicholas Bloom and colleagues find strong links between es... Read more...
21 May 2014
In their blog, Renata Lemos and John Van Reenen say that good management in schools has a stronger effect than class sizes or quality teaching. This blog was posted in the guardian.com teachers' blog on May 20, 2014 ... Read more...
20 May 2014
Professors at Harvard Business School, the London School of Economics and Columbia University's business school examined the schedules of 356 chief executives in India and found that family CEOs worked 8 percent fewer ho... Read more...
07 March 2014
New York: When it comes to good management the US is on the top of the world followed by Germany, Japan, Sweden and Canada, while China's tail of poorly run firms is shorter than India's, says a study by Stanford Univers... Read more...
23 January 2014
For the past decade a group of economists, including Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics, have been trying to bring some rigour to the argument. They have focused o... Read more...
17 January 2014
One of my pet causes is the importance of good management. Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen have observed that management quality can account much of the persistent difference in productivity across firms in a given se... Read more...
30 January 2013
Now we have science saying it: management consultants add value. A formal study, sponsored by the World Bank and using a control group of factories as well as a treatment group, quantified the results. First year economi... Read more...
27 January 2013
The research aims to develop a much clearer picture of what business leaders and top management teams can do to develop their organizations and become more innovative. A large-scale research project conducted by McKinsey... Read more...
13 December 2011
Professor John Van Reenen, director of the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance, told The Telegraph that management quality was "highly linked" to productivity and profits, and that second- and third-... Read more...
01 December 2011
LSE academics surveyed 10,000 companies for the Business Department. Family firms should heed LSE's findings: many of our most successful private companies are family-run and they will be justifiably indignant at the Lon... Read more...
Research has suggested that family-owned companies have the UK's most satisfied workforces. John van Reenen of the LSE recently accused family businesses of inefficiency due to poor management quality. This article ... Read more...
19 July 2011
LSE and Harvard Business School researchers have conducted a survey to find out what chief executives do all day. 60pc of time was taken up with meetings. This article appeared in The Times on June 2, 2011 No ... Read more...
02 June 2011
If your company’s CEO is attending too many private lunches and golf games, he could be wasting company resources. But he also could be making valuable business connections. Determining which scenario is more likely was ... Read more...
30 May 2011
Information-based systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, will push decision-making toward the bottom of the corporate ladder. Communication systems, such as e-mail and instant messaging application... Read more...
01 November 2010
Professor John Van Reenen, director of CEP, said: “An overriding message is that management quality varies greatly within countries, even within a publicly dominated healthcare sector like the NHS. Many of the same facto... Read more...
Fewer than 60% of managers in UK hospitals were found to have a clinical degree, compared to more than 90% in Sweden, and the UK had the lowest proportion of managers with a clinical degree in all the countries surveyed.... Read more...
28 October 2010
Private sector hospitals perform better than public sector, according to a new report co-written by McKinsey and the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE. Management in Healthcare: Why good practice really matters... Read more...
27 October 2010
Hospitals in the United Kingdom are “better managed” than their counterparts in several European countries and Canada, new research concludes. It also says that private sector organisations perform best overall across th... Read more...
From America to Sweden, the best hospitals in a rich country outperform the rest. But how? Stephen Dorgan of McKinsey, a consultancy, and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics have tried to answer this. They ... Read more...
There is a strong association between high quality management and patient outcomes in UK hospitals, the management consultancy McKinsey and Co have claimed. The consultancy, with the London School of Economics' Centre fo... Read more...
26 October 2010
UK Hospitals are better managed and have more satisfied patients than hospitals in Sweden, Germany, Canada, Italy and France, management consultants McKinsey and academics from the London School of Economics report. Only... Read more...
Researchers at the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance and consultancy McKinsey & Company assessed the management practices of almost 1,200 hospitals in seven countries: the UK, US, Canada, France... Read more...
25 October 2010
25th October 2010 - for immediate release Better managed hospitals have significantly lower mortality rates, significantly more satisfied patients - and all at a lower cost. This is one of the principal findings of ne... Read more...
Steven Morgan of McKinsey and John Van Reenen of LSE have studied 1,200 hospitals to see which are the best managed and the practices that common to the best. They found five characteristics shared by well-run hospitals,... Read more...
22 October 2010
Competition in the English NHS improves hospital efficiency and can save the health service significant amounts of money, according to a new study by researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE). The study fin... Read more...
30 June 2010
On average, a 10 percent increase in the private sector wages is associated with a 7 percent increase in heart attack death say Carol Propper of the University of Bristol and John Van Reenen of the Centre for Economic Pe... Read more...
30 May 2010
Familienunternehmen sind die besten Firmen überhaupt? Und wenn die Rahmenbedingungen eines Landes nicht stimmen, scheitert selbst der erfolgreichste Manager? Diese beiden Glaubenssätze haven Wirtschaftsprofessor Nicholas... Read more...
27 May 2010
... the evidence that market reforms have improved healthcare in England is mixed. Competitive areas A study from the London School of Economics showed fewer 30-day deaths from acute MI in more competitive areas and c... Read more...
18 March 2010
Hospitals with stronger management have better clinical results, according to a London School of Economics study. The LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance found that management was better where more senior staff had ... Read more...
15 March 2010
Hospitals with stronger management have better clinical results, according to a London School of Economics study. The LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance found that management was better where more ... This articl... Read more...
18 February 2010
Yet the opposite is true, according to a report from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics (LSE) that finds "that the presence of investors boosts innovation by decreasing the risks face... Read more...
31 March 2009
Press coverage of the management survey in an Italian newspaper. This article appeared in Republica on the 27th March 2009. Link to article. Related Links Nick Bloom webpage Raffaella Sadun webpage ... Read more...
27 March 2009
John Van Reenen interviewed on pension funds – that they have a role to play in demanding better corporate governance. This interview was broadcast on the 13th March 2009. Link to article. Related Link... Read more...
13 March 2009
Three pieces of government-backed research have confirmed that effective use of IT can give companies a "significant" productivity boost. The first paper, 'It ain't what you do it's the way that you do IT' from the Cent... Read more...
10 October 2008
Do common management techniques such as setting targets, monitoring performance and "lean" manufacturing actually help companies become more productive and profitable? An extensive new study suggests the answer is yes. R... Read more...
08 September 2008
Article refers to the study Management Practice and Productivity: Why They Matter, conducted by academics including John Van Reenen, professor of economics and director of the Centre for Economic Performance at London Sc... Read more...
13 November 2007
Nick Bloom, of Stanford University, and Rafaella Sadun and John Van Reenen, of the London School of Economics, find that British factories of American multinationals are more productive than the country's other foreign-o... Read more...
17 May 2007
Companies that are bigger, more globalised and better managed provide a better work-life balance for their employees, according to new research Work-Life Balance, Management Practices and Productivity by Nick Bloom, Tob... Read more...
09 January 2006