This paper models the international competition between a domestic firm and its vertically integrated foreign rival …

new products. The analysis of business strategy is thus at the intersection of market competition and a firm's efforts to … secure persistently superior performance via investments in better management and organization. We empirically analyze the … management is driven by two key organizational trade-offs: employee initiative vs. coordination as well as exploration of novel …

the opportunity for managerial slack. Consistent with the notion that competition mitigates managerial slack, we find that …, firms in competitive industries experience no significant effect. When we examine which agency problem competition mitigates …

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 about a fifth of the spread of productivity, a similar fraction as …