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Vox EU:

Mafias and Firms (Podcast)

Which firms are infiltrated by organised crime, and why? We know that organised crime has links to some firms in the legal economy. But how big is this infiltration, and what do they gain from it? Rocco Macchiavello tell...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics: Forthcoming

Technological Change and Domestic Outsourcing

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered dif...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

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...

CEP discussion paper

Omnia Juncta in Uno*: foreign powers and trademark protection in Shanghai's concession era

We investigate how firms and markets adapt to trademark protection, an extensively utilized but under-examined form of IP protection to address asymmetric information, by exploring a historical precedent: China's 1923 tr...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Building a Productive Workforce: The Role of Structured Management Practices

In an influential study, Bender et al. [Bender S, Bloom N, Card D, Van Reenen J, Wolter S (2018) Management practices, workforce selection, and productivity. J. Labor Econom. 36(S1):S371-S409] document consistent relatio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technological change and domestic outsourcing

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered dif...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Education and management practices

The empirical management literature has found that the education of both managers and the workforce more generally appears to be an important driver of better management practices. This article sets out how such relation...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Organizing Global Supply Chains: Input-Output Linkages and Vertical Integration

We study how the technological importance of inputs—measured by cost shares—is related to the decision to “make” or “buy” that input. Using detailed French international trade data and an instrumental variable approach b...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Productivity and organization in portuguese firms

Using employer-employee matched and firm production quantity and input data for Portuguese firms, we study the endogenous response of productivity to firm reorganizations as measured by changes in the number of managemen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intellectual property and the organization of the global value chain

This paper introduces the concept of intangible assets in a property rights model of sequential supply chains. Firms transmit knowledge to their suppliers to facilitate input customization. Yet, to avoid knowledge dissip...Read more...

Journal article

Health Affairs:

Hospital prices grew substantially faster than physician prices for hospital-based care in 2007-14

Evidence suggests that growth in providers' prices drives growth in health care spending on the privately insured. However, existing work has not systematically differentiated between the growth rate of hospital prices a...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Relational contracts and supplier turnover in the global economy

Headquarters and their specialized component suppliers have a vital interest in establishing long-term collaborations. When formal contracts are not enforceable, such efficiency-enhancing cooperations can be established ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Special and differential treatment for developing countries

Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries (SDT) constitutes a central feature of the GATT/WTO system. Its formal goal is to foster export-led growth in developing countries. Its theoretical foundations ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity and organization in Portuguese firms

The productivity of firms is, at least partly, determined by a firm's actions and decisions. One of these decisions involves the organization of production in terms of the number of layers of management the firm decides ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Relational contracts and supplier turnover in the global economy

Headquarters and their specialized component suppliers have a vital interest in establishing long-term collaborations. When formal contracts are not enforceable, such efficiency enhancing cooperations can be established ...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Development and Cultural Change:

Organization of disaster aid delivery: Spending your donations

Extreme disasters catch the public eye, often resulting in massive infusions of aid that affect not just individual well-being but the fabric of societies. In developing countries, this typically involves foreign nongove...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Management in America

There are strong links between the performance of US manufacturing plants and the quality of their systems of monitoring, targets and incentives, according to research by Professor Nicholas Bloom and colleagues. Their an...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

IT and management in America

The Census Bureau recently conducted a survey of management practices in over 30,000 plants across the US, the first large-scale survey of management in America. Analyzing these data reveals several striking results. Fir...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... 'Smart and illicit': the making of a successful entrepreneur

Smart teenagers who engage in illicit activities are much more likely to become entrepreneurs, according to research by Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein. But, they note, being self-employed doesn’t necessarily make someon...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Smart and illicit: who becomes an entrepreneur and does it pay?

We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between “entrepreneurs” and other business owners. The incorporated self-employed have a distinct combination of cognitive, noncogniti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment

About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese tra...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Does management matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investiga...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Working or shirking?

Over 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there is widespread skepticism over its impact highlighted by phrases like “shirking from home”. We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 13,0...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

Big ideas: How competition improves management and productivity

John Van Reenen sketches the evolution of CEP research on the drivers of productivity growth - and its impact on policies to foster competition....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Management Matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Competition Raise Productivity Through Improving Management Quality?

A classic question in industrial organization is whether competition raises productivity and if so, through what mechanism? I discuss recent empirical evidence from both large-scale databases and specific industries whic...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Why do management practices differ across firms and countries?

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. For example, looking at disaggregated data on U.S. manufacturing industries, Syverson (2004a) found that plants at...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...

CEP discussion paper

New Approaches to Measuring Management and Firm Organization

We detail the methodology that we have been using to quantify managerial and organizational practices across firms and countries in recent years. This has been used in many pieces of research at the Centre for Economic P...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...

CEP discussion paper

The Division of Labor, Coordination, and the Demand for Information Processing

Since Adam Smith’s time, the division of labor in production has increased significantly, while information processing has become an important part of work. This paper examines whether the need to coordinate an increasin...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

Sinking the Blues: the Impact of Shop Closing Hours on Labor and Product Markets

There is a growing consensus among economists that extending shop opening hours creates jobs. While this is probably true in deregulating industries, this paper argues there are some deficiencies in the existing hypothes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can a Work Organization Have An Attitude Problem? The Impact of Workplaces on Employee Attitude and Economic Outcomes

In this study we examine whether a workplace can induce good or bad attitudes among its employees and whether any such ¿workplace attitudes¿ affect economic outcomes. This study analyzes responses of thousands of employe...Read more...