The Great Aid Debate pits those who are radically opposed to foreign aid against those who champion its reform to achieve greater aid effectiveness. This paper offers an analysis of this debate by introducing a heuristic distinction between aid 'radicals' and aid 'reformers'. The radical...

We detail the methodology that we have been using to quantify managerial and organizational practices across firms and countries in recent years. This has been used in many pieces of research at the Centre for Economic Performance. We discuss the pros and cons of such survey tools, describing...

In this paper we introduce concepts that build a theoretical notion of reputation risk and establish the need to extend our approach to managing such risk.. The existing literature on reputation risk has tended to be reactive and focus on immediate business threats rather than trying to...

John Van Reenen sketches the evolution of CEP research on the drivers of productivity growth - and its impact on policies to foster competition.

The Census Bureau recently conducted a survey of management practices in over 30,000 plants across the US, the first large-scale survey of management in America. Analyzing these data reveals several striking results. First, more structured management practices are tightly linked to higher levels...

Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP differences across firms and countries. This review paper discusses what has...

The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US “productivity miracle” is due to a natural advantage of being located in the US then...

In this study we examine whether a workplace can induce good or bad attitudes among its employees and whether any such ¿workplace attitudes¿ affect economic outcomes. This study analyzes responses of thousands of employees working in nearly two hundred branches to the emp loyee opinion survey...