Standard models of hierarchy assume that agents and middle managers are better informed than principals about how to implement a particular task. We estimate the value of the informational advantage held by supervisors (middle managers) when ministerial leadership (the principal) introduced a...

Wage gaps between workers with a college or graduate degree and those with only a high school degree rose rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. Since then, the rate of growth in these wage gaps has progressively slowed, and though the gaps remain large, they were essentially unchanged...

This paper shows that large, multi-establishment business enterprises face a high cost of middle management in poor countries and that this cost inhibits the growth of the modern sector. We provide new empirical evidence using a database covering compensation for 300,000 middle managers working...

We critically review the emerging literature in Organizational and Personnel Economics concerning the role of managers and management practices. Our focus is on the middle managers who populate the hierarchies between top executives and front-line employees. We are especially concerned with...

We study the allocation and productivity consequences of training production line supervisors in soft skills via a randomized controlled trial. Consistent with standard practice for training investments within firms, we asked middle managers -- who sit above supervisors in the hierarchy -- to...

Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting...

In this paper, we use a French matched employer-employee survey, the COI survey, conducted in 1997, to describe the general features of organizational change in manufacturing firms with more than 50 employees. In a first section, we explore the methodological issues associated with the building...

The local academic science base plays a dominant role in determining where and when biotechnology is adopted by existing firms or -- much more frequently -- exploited by new entrants in the U.S. In Japan this new dominant technology has almost exclusively been introduced through organizational...

One of the productive activities engaging the work force is reorganizing. When factors of production are better matched, productivity is higher. The probabilistic matching model of Diamond, Mortensen, and others provides a way to make the idea of reorganization precise. Because the flow of...