IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepdps/dp1433.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Management as a technology?

Author

Listed:
  • Nicholas Bloom
  • Raffaella Sadun
  • John Van Reenen

Abstract

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain firm and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries. We find large cross-country differences in the adoption of management practices, with the US having the highest size-weighted average management score. We present a formal model of \Management as a Technology", and structurally estimate it using panel data to recover parameters including the depreciation rate and adjustment costs of managerial capital (both found to be larger than for tangible non-managerial capital). Our model also predicts (i) a positive impact of management on firm performance; (ii) a positive relationship between product market competition and average management quality (part of which stems from the larger covariance between management with firm size as competition strengthens); and (iii) a rise in the level and a fall in the dispersion of management with firm age. We find strong empirical support for all of these predictions in our data. Finally, building on our model, we find that differences in management practices account for about 30% of total factor productivity differences both between countries and within countries across firms.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicholas Bloom & Raffaella Sadun & John Van Reenen, 2016. "Management as a technology?," CEP Discussion Papers dp1433, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
  • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1433
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1433.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Luis Garicano & Claire Lelarge & John Van Reenen, 2016. "Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(11), pages 3439-3479, November.
    2. Sørensen, Bent E & Kalemli-Özcan, Sebnem & Volosovych, Vadym & Villegas-Sanchez, Carolina & Yesiltas, Sevcan, 2015. "How to construct nationally representative firm level data from the ORBIS global database," CEPR Discussion Papers 10829, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Matthias Breuer, 2021. "How Does Financial‐Reporting Regulation Affect Industry‐Wide Resource Allocation?," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(1), pages 59-110, March.
    2. Jan De Loecker & Tim Obermeier & John Van Reenen, 2022. "Firms and Inequality," CEP Discussion Papers dp1838, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    3. Simone Lenzu & Francesco Manaresi, 2019. "Sources and implications of resource misallocation: new evidence from firm-level marginal products and user costs," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 485, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    4. Dan Andrews & Chiara Criscuolo & Peter N. Gal, 2019. "The best versus the rest: divergence across firms during the global productivity slowdown," CEP Discussion Papers dp1645, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    5. Miguel Almunia & David López-Rodríguez & Enrique Moral-Benito, 2018. "Evaluating the macro-representativeness of a firm-level database: an application for the Spanish economy," Occasional Papers 1802, Banco de España.
    6. Lenzu, Simone & Manaresi, Francesco, 2018. "Do Marginal Products Differ from User Costs? Micro-Level Evidence from Italian Firms," Working Papers 276, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.
    7. Francesco Trebbi & Miao Ben Zhang, 2022. "The Cost of Regulatory Compliance in the United States," NBER Working Papers 30691, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Stieglitz, Moritz & Setzer, Ralph, 2022. "Firm-level employment, labour market reforms, and bank distress," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    9. Fuest, Clemens & Hugger, Felix & Neumeier, Florian, 2022. "Corporate profit shifting and the role of tax havens: Evidence from German country-by-country reporting data," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 194(C), pages 454-477.
    10. Marco FRIGERIO & Daniela VANDONE, 2018. "Virtuous or Vicious? Development Banks in Europe," Departmental Working Papers 2018-07, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    11. Alam, M. Jahangir, 2020. "Capital misallocation: Cyclicality and sources," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 112(C).
    12. Akcigit, Ufuk & Alp, Harun & Diegmann, André & Serrano-Velarde, Nicolas, 2024. "Committing to grow: Employment targets and firm dynamics," IWH Discussion Papers 17/2023, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), revised 2024.
    13. Jose Joaquin Lopez & Jesica Torres, 2020. "Size-dependent policies, talent misallocation, and the return to skill," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 38, pages 59-93, October.
    14. Cristina Fernández & Roberta García & Paloma Lopez-Garcia & Benedicta Marzinotto & Roberta Serafini & Juuso Vanhala & Ladislav Wintr, 2017. "Firm growth in Europe: An overview based on the COMPNET labour module," BCL working papers 107, Central Bank of Luxembourg.
    15. Daniel A. Dias & Carlos Robalo Marques & Christine Richmond, 2020. "A Tale of Two Sectors: Why is Misallocation Higher in Services than in Manufacturing?," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 66(2), pages 361-393, June.
    16. Bachas, Pierre & Fattal Jaef, Roberto N. & Jensen, Anders, 2019. "Size-dependent tax enforcement and compliance: Global evidence and aggregate implications," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 203-222.
    17. Jarkko Harju & Ilpo Kauppinen & Olli Ropponen, 2017. "Firm Responses to an Interest Barrier: Empirical Evidence," EconPol Working Paper 3, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    18. Mary Amiti & Cédric Duprez & Jozef Konings & John Van Reenen, 2023. "FDI and Superstar Spillovers: Evidence from Firm-to-Firm Transactions," NBER Working Papers 31128, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Luis Medrano-Adán & Vicente Salas-Fumás & J. Sanchez-Asin, 2015. "Heterogeneous entrepreneurs from occupational choices in economies with minimum wages," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 597-619, March.
    20. Julia Bachtrögler & Christoph Hammer & Wolf Heinrich Reuter & Florian Schwendinger, 2019. "Guide to the galaxy of EU regional funds recipients: evidence from new data," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 46(1), pages 103-150, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    management practices; productivity; competition; growth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior
    • M2 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Economics
    • O32 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Management of Technological Innovation and R&D
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1433. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion-papers/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.