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What is good management, and how is it transmitted across firms and plants? In a recent paper, we use survey and administrative data, coupled with a structural model of management, to explore these questions. We show tha...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh and John Van Reenen
13 August 2025
Large language models can conduct interviews at speed and at scale. Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel present a new open source platform to support this innovative form of qualitative research....Read more...
Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel
20 February 2025
Organisations don't just provide employment: they solve, or attempt to solve, important problems in our society. Organizational economics has made some impressive strides in recent years to show what choices organisation...Read more...
Ghazala Azmat
6 September 2024
Following the release of the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, there has been renewed research into profit shifting by multinational firms. This column utilises a novel dataset to show that well-managed subsidiaries...Read more...
Katarzyna Bilicka and Daniela Scur
4 September 2024
Governments around the world implemented widespread business support during the COVID-19 pandemic. The measures may have affected employment dynamics and reallocation, with potential consequences for aggregate productivi...Read more...
Sara Calligaris, Gabriele Ciminelli, Helia Costa, Chiara Criscuolo, Lilas Demmou, Isabelle Desnoyers-James, Guido Franco and Rudy Verlhac
9 March 2024
The potentially negative effects of market concentration on consumers and workers has received much attention, but Mary Amiti, Cédric Duprez, Jozef Konings and John Van Reenen find that big firms can also promote product...Read more...
Mary Amiti, Cedric Duprez, Jozef Konings and John Van Reenen
20 February 2024
Krishan Shah, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites, and Ivan Yotzov analyse new firm-level data to explore future remote work trends. Managers expect 2028 remote work levels to mirror those of 2023, ...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Krishan Shah, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov
18 February 2024
Steven Davis and Nick Bloom discuss the big shift to work from home, what it means for productivity, why perceptions in this regard often differ between managers and workers, and why - on balance - the big shift is a ble...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis
2 November 2023
The rising dominance of large firms in many industrialised countries over the last few decades has received much attention, largely focusing on the potential negative effects of this increased market concentration. Using...Read more...
31 October 2023
The UK investment ecosystem needs rewiring across the board to increase firms' desire to invest in productive and sustainable assets, and to enhance their ability to do so. Paul Brandily, Mimosa Distefano, Krishan Shah, ...Read more...
Paul Brandily, Mimosa Distefano, Krishan Shah, Gregory Thwaites and Anna Valero
24 October 2023
Mary Amiti, Cedric Duprez, Jozef Konings and John Van Reenen investigate whether large firms also generate positive effects. Using firm-to-firm transaction data for an industrialised country, Belgium, they find that larg...Read more...
12 October 2023
Morten Bennedsen, Birthe Larsen, Ian Schmutte and Daniela Scur discuss how the furlough schemes implemented during the pandemic yielded benefits even after Covid-19 restrictions ended and helped firms thrive....Read more...
Morten Bennedsen, Berthe Larsen, Ian M. Schmutte and Daniela Scur
5 September 2023
It's Friday afternoon in the city. There are office blocks all around and a restaurant or bar on every corner... so where is everyone? If occupancy and travel data are anything to go by, they're probably at home. Nick Bl...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom
29 August 2023
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Ufuk Akcigit and John Van Reenen
22 August 2023
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Raffaella Sadun discusses her research findings with host David Edmonds, on what exactly we mean by 'management' and what effective management looks like in a workplace....Read more...
Raffaella Sadun
1 August 2023
Formal debt financing is an important source of external financing for startups, but creditors face information gaps, as startups lack a proven track record. Felix Bracht, Jeroen Mahieu and Steven Vanhaverbeke argue that...Read more...
Felix Bracht, Jeroen Mahieu and Steven Vanhaverbeke
4 May 2023
Is enabling citizens to complain about public services an effective way of improving government services, or should we be more concerned about their accuracy and reliability? In new research, Jonathan Colmer, Mary Evans,...Read more...
Jonathan Colmer, Mary F. Evans and Jay Shimshack
18 April 2023
Leaving the European Union has undoubtedly had effects on the UK economy. The most obvious ones will be on international trade. But Brexit might also have an impact on business investment, which is crucial for the econom...Read more...
Jonathan Haskel and Josh Martin
13 March 2023
There's a view out there - call it the "superhero" theory of leadership - in which the individual vision, charisma, and brilliance of a CEO makes or breaks a company. That view is dangerous - not so much because CEOs don...Read more...
23 November 2022
We elicit subjective probability distributions from business executives about their own-firm outcomes at a one-year look-ahead horizon. In terms of question design, our key innovation is to let survey respondents freely ...Read more...
David E. Altig, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Brent Meyer and Nicholas Parker
1 November 2022
The management of firms in developing countries is typically of lower quality than in richer parts of the world. A study of Mexico by Nicholas Bloom, Leonardo Iacovone, Mariana Pereira-López and John Van Reenen indicates...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Leonardo Iacovone, Mariana Pereira-Lopez and John Van Reenen
20 October 2022
We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck...Read more...
David E. Altig, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Brent Meyer and Emil Mihaylov
30 July 2022
John Van Reenen, Nicholas Bloom, and Raffaella Sadun explain how the World Management Survey provides the evidence needed for designing industrial strategies to tackle low productivity....Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
20 May 2022
The adoption of health information and communication technology (HICT) has surged over the past two decades. We survey the medical and economic literature on HICT adoption and its impact on clinical outcomes, productivit...Read more...
Ari Bronsoler, Joseph Doyle and John Van Reenen
4 April 2022
There have been some dramatic changes in the business landscape in American firms over the last four decades that have been extensively documented by researchers and are the subject of much public debate (e.g. Van Reenen...Read more...
Jan De Loecker, Tim Obermeier and John Van Reenen
3 March 2022
