We argue that greater misallocation is a key driver of the worse management practices in Mexico compared to the US. These management practices are strongly associated with higher productivity, growth, trade, and innovation. One indicator of greater misallocation in Mexico is the weaker...

We link a new UK management survey covering 8,000 firms to panel data on productivity in manufacturing and services. There is a large variation in management practices, which are highly correlated with productivity, profitability and size. Uniquely, the survey collects firms' micro forecasts of...

We use a major new survey of UK firms, the Decision Maker Panel, to assess the impact of the June 2016 Brexit referendum. We identify three key results. First, the UK's decision to leave the EU has generated a large, broad and long-lasting increase in uncertainty. Second, anticipation of Brexit...

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...

Ever since Keynes' famous quote about animal spirits, there has been an interest in linking firms' expectations and actions. However, empirical evidence has been limited due to a lack of firm-level panel data on expectations and outcomes. In this paper, we build such a dataset by combining a...

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...

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...