What Drives Differences in Management?

Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten and John van Reenen

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of “structured” management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for about a fifth of the spread of productivity, a similar fraction as that accounted for by R&D and twice as much as explained by IT. We find evidence for four “drivers” of management: competition, business environment, learning spillovers and human capital. Collectively, these drivers account for about a third of the dispersion of structured management practices.

Keywords: Management; productivity; competition; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 M2 O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-hrm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2017/CES-WP-17-32.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What drives differences in management? (2017)
Working Paper: What Drives Differences in Management? (2017)
Working Paper: What Drives Differences in Management? (2017)
Working Paper: What Drives Differences in Management? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:17-32

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