Results

CEP discussion paper

Management and firm dynamism

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and improve the performan...Read more...

Blog

MIT Sloan Management Review:

Reskilling the Workforce With AI: Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun (podcast)

Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun's research has historically focused on digital reskilling. Now, rapid technological changes - like AI - are reshaping the nature of work. Raffaella's research has explore...Read more...

Journal article

PNAS:

The international empirics of management

A country's national income broadly depends on the quantity and quality of workers and capital. But how well these factors are managed within and between firms may be a key determinant of a country's productivity and its...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The economics of organisational strategy

Many of today's global problems, such as sustainability, technology, skills, and diversity can only be solved by organisations. This column argues that more work is needed to understand strategic management by firms, how...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Business Review:

Designing a successful reskilling program

In this article, written as a follow up to the award-winning "Reskilling in the Age of AI", the authors report the results of a reskilling survey that they conducted with chief human resource officers from approximately ...Read more...

Journal article

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Communication Within Firms: Evidence from CEO Turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level communication measures derived from communications metadata several months before and after a CEO transition for 102 firms to study whether and how this organizational event is reflected...Read more...

Journal article

Advances in Health Care Management:

Safe Surgery Checklist Implementation: Associations of Management Practice and Safety Culture Change

Designing and developing safe systems has been a persistent challenge in health care, and in surgical settings in particular. In efforts to promote safety, safety culture, i.e., shared values regarding safety management,...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Come Together: Firm boundaries and delegation

We jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them by confronting an incomplete-contracts model with data on vertical integration and delegation for thousands of firms around the world. In...Read more...

Journal article

Harvard Business Review:

Reskilling in the Age of AI

In the coming decades, as the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled—a profoundly complex societal challenge that will sometimes require wo...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Business Review:

Reskilling in the age of AI

As the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled. Companies have a critical role to play in addressing this challenge. To learn more about wha...Read more...

Blog

Social Science Space:

Raffaella Sadun On effective management (Podcast)

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...

CEP discussion paper

Remote work across jobs, companies and space

The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure and characterize this shift, we examine more than 250 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. Our measurements rely on a st...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Using job postings to quantify remote work

The COVID pandemic initiated an enduring shift to remote work. But there is little evidence to explain where this shift is taking place at a micro level because the sample sizes are too small. Stephen Hansen, Peter Lambe...Read more...

Journal article

Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour:

Perceptions related to engaging in non-driving activities in an automated vehicle while commuting: a text mining approach

Automated vehicles (AVs) offer human operators the opportunity to participate in non-driving activities while on the move. In this study, we examined and compared drivers' perception of non-driving activities in two driv...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Business Review:

The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader

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...

Journal article

NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery:

How health care professionals view their organizations' governance and decision-making.

A survey of the NEJM Catalyst Insights Council finds that health care organizations' strategic priorities have held steady - with even more emphasis on financial returns. Now including global data....Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Human Computer Studies:

Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to assess current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

Journal article

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications:

The impact of Covid-19 on digital communication patterns

We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees' digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggreg...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Improving productivity through better management practices

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...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Working harder and longer: how managers use their time when working from home

Managers worked longer hours during the pandemic and changed how they used their time, find Thomaz Teodorovicz, Raffaella Sadun, Andrew L. Kun, and Orit Shaer. They suggest how better technology, including AI, could help...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The anatomy of a hospital system merger: the patient did not respond well to treatment

Despite the continuing US hospital merger wave, it remains unclear how mergers change, or fail to change, hospital behavior and performance. We open the "black box" of hospital practices through a mega-merger between two...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How does working from home during Covid-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day. We analyze the results from an online time-use survey with data on ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to access current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Opening the black box of hospital mergers

Despite the current wave of US hospital mergers, it is unclear how they change behaviour and performance. Martin Gaynor, Adam Sacarny, Raffaella Sadun, Chad Syverson and Shruthi Venkatesh show that while mergers have ach...Read more...

Journal article

Human-Computer Interaction: Forthcoming

How does working from home during COVID-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

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Blog

LSE Business Review:

How do internal communication flows change when a new CEO is appointed?

CEO turnovers are significant organisational events that typically mark a discontinuity in firm strategy and operations. These likely changes are visible in internal communication flows. Stephen Michael Impink, Andrea Pr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The demand for executive skills

We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Communication within firms: evidence from CEO turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level measures derived from communications metadata before and after a CEO transition in 102 firms to study if CEO turnover impacts employees' communication flows. We find that CEO turnover le...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

The World Management Survey at 18: Lessons and the way forward

Understanding how differences in management 'best practices' affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics, and public policy. Th...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Turbulence, Firm Decentralization, and Growth in Bad Times

What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information increases (the “localist” view). On t...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

CEO Behavior and Firm Performance

We measure the behavior of over 1,100 CEOs in six countries (Brazil, France, Germany, India, UK and US) using a new methodology that combines (i) a survey measuring each activity undertaken in a random work-week by the e...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Healthy Business? Managerial Education and Management in Healthcare

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals closer to univers...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Come together: firm boundaries and delegation

We jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them by confronting an incomplete-contracts model with data on vertical integration and delegation for thousands of firms around the world. In...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Financial Studies:

Managing the family firm: Evidence from CEOs at work

We build a comparable and bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply for 1,114 CEOs and investigate whether family and professional CEOs differ along this dimension. Family CEOs work 9% fewer hours relative to professional CE...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Healthy business? Managerial education and management in healthcare

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals that are closer t...Read more...

Journal article

Harvard Business Review:

Why do we undervalue competent management?

Business schools teach MBA students that you can't compete on the basis of management processes because they're easily copied. Operational effectiveness is table stakes in the competitive universe, according to the strat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Turbulence, firm decentralization and growth in bad times

What is the optimal form of firm organization during 'bad times'? The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information increases (the 'localist' view). On t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management as a technology?

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain firm and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 fi...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

International data on measuring management practices

We examine methods used to survey firms on their management and organizational practices. We contrast the strengths and weaknesses of "open ended questions" (like the World Management Survey) with "closed questions" (lik...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

International data on measuring management practices

We examine methods used to survey firms on their management and organizational practices. We contrast the strengths and weaknesses of “open ended questions” (like the World Management Survey) with “closed questions” (lik...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Family business: management effort and firm performance

Might familyowned, familyrun firms be a serious obstacle to productivity growth in Europe? Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun have collected time use data on over 1,000 chief executive officers to explore d...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Does Management Matter in schools?

We collect data on management practices in over 1,800 high schools in eight countries. We show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obt...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Do private equity owned firms have better management practices?

Using an innovative survey measure of management practices on over 15,000 firms, we find private equity firms are better managed than government, family, and privately owned firms, and have similar management to publicly...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does management matter In schools?

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... New technology: who wins, who loses?

Technology has transformed the once powerful office of ambassador into a glorified sales position, while nurses, teaching assistants and medical technicians all benefit from the ICT revolution. According to an empirical ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

The new empirical economics of management

Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP diff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing the family firm: evidence from CEOs at work

We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs, and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs’ diaries in a detailed and com...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What Do CEOs Do?

We develop a methodology to collect and analyze data on CEOs’ time use. The idea - sketched out in a simple theoretical set-up - is that CEO time is a scarce resource and its allocation can help us identify the firm’s pr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives

We exploit a unique combination of administrative sources and survey data to study the match between firms and managers. The data includes manager characteristics, such as risk aversion and talent; firm characteristics, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Span of Control and Span of Activity

For both practitioners and researchers, span of control plays an important role in defining and understanding the role of the CEO. In this paper, we combine organizational chart information for a sample of 65 companies w...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Americans do IT better: US multinationals and the productivity miracle

US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management Practices Across Firms and Countries

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing A...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Hospital performance: the impact of good management

CEP research highlights the potential role of improving the quality of hospital management for raising productivity in the UK healthcare sector...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Recent Advances in the Empirics of Organizational Economics

We present a survey of recent contributions in the empirical organizational economics, focusing on management practices and decentralization. Productivity dispersion between firms and countries has motivated the improved...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Modern management: good for the environment or just hot air?

Nick Bloom and colleagues examine whether well-managed firms are more or less energy-efficient than badly managed firms...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Product Market Competition Lead Firms to Decentralize?

There is a widespread sense that over the last two decades firms have been decentralizing decisions to employees further down the managerial hierarchy. Economists have developed a range of theories to account for delegat...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Do private equity owned firms have better management practices?

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from over 4,000 medium sized manufacturing firms across Asia, Europe and the US. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Organization of Firms Across Countries

We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sale...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization

Guided by theories of management by exception, we study the impact of Information and Communication Technology on worker and plant manager autonomy and on span of control. We find, using an original dataset of American a...Read more...

EDS discussion paper

Americans do I.T. Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle

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CEP discussion paper

Modern Management: Good for the Environment or Just Hot Air?

We use an innovative methodology to measure management practices in over 300 manufacturing firms in the UK. We then match this management data to production and energy usage information for establishments owned by these ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Does planning regulation protect independent retailers?

Raffaella Sadun reveals that planning regulations supposed to 'save the traditional British High Street' have in fact done the opposite....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Planning Regulation Protect Independent Retailers?

Entry regulations against big-box retailers have been introduced in many countries to protect smaller independent stores. Using a new dataset from the UK, I show that in fact these entry regulations have been associated ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

What drives good management around the world?

CEP's global survey of over 4,000 firms reveals huge variations in the quality of management practices...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Americans Do I.T. Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle

The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US “productivity...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity and ICT: A Review of the Evidence

We survey the micro and macro literature on the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on productivity. The “Solow Paradox” of the absence of an impact of ICT on productivity no longer holds, if it e...Read more...

CentrePiece article

It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do I.T.

It's taken a long time to confirm that computers boost productivity. But as Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen show, the key to their success seems to lie in management - and that's where US firms have been ...Read more...

EDS discussion paper

Information Technology and Productivity: It ain't what you do it's the way that you do I.T.

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