What Drives Differences in Management?

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

No 11995, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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)
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

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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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