Management Practices Across Firms and Countries

Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John van Reenen

No 17850, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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 American, Japanese, and German firms are the best managed. Firms in developing countries, such as Brazil, China and India tend to be poorly managed. American retail firms and hospitals are also well managed by international standards, although American schools are worse managed than those in several other developed countries. We also find substantial variation in management practices across organizations in every country and every sector, mirroring the heterogeneity in the spread of performance in these sectors. One factor linked to this variation is ownership. Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed. Stronger product market competition and higher worker skills are associated with better management practices. Less regulated labor markets are associated with improvements in incentive management practices such as performance based promotion.

JEL-codes: M1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-hrm and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (234)

Published as Bloom, Nicholas, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. "Management Practices across Firms and Countries." Academy of Management Perspectives 26, no. 1 (February 2012): 12–33.

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Working Paper: Management Practices Across Firms and Countries (2011)
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