Does Product Market Competition Lead Firms to Decentralize?

Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John van Reenen

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: 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 delegation, but there is less empirical evidence, especially across countries. This has limited the ability to understand the phenomenon of decentralization. To address the empirical lacuna we have developed a research program to measure the internal organization of firms - including their decentralization decisions - across a large range of industries and countries. In this paper we investigate whether greater product market competition increases decentralization. For example, tougher competition may make local manager's information more valuable, as delays to decisions become more costly. Since globalization and liberalization have increased the competitiveness of product markets, one explanation for the trend towards decentralization could be increased competition. Of course there are a range of other factors that may also be at play, including human capital, information and communication technology, culture and industrial composition. To tackle these issues we collected detailed information on the internal organization of firms across nations. The few datasets that exist are either from a single industry or (at best) across many firms in a single country. We analyze data on almost 4,000 firms across twelve countries in Europe, North America and Asia. We find that competition does indeed seem to foster greater decentralization.

Keywords: Decentralization; management practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 M2 O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (86)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Does Product Market Competition Lead Firms to Decentralize? (2010)
Working Paper: Does product market competition lead firms to decentralize? (2010)
Working Paper: Does Product Market Competition Lead Firms to Decentralize? (2010)
Working Paper: Does product market competition lead firms to decentralize? (2009)
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