We organized business associations for the owner-managers of randomly selected young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,800 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a "no- meetings" control group....

This paper examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships, geography and the structure of the production network in firm performance. We develop a simple model where firms can outsource tasks and search for suppliers in different locations. Low search and outsourcing costs lead firms to...

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...

This paper, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance co-sponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven papers on corporate...

This paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth in these firms. A simple model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales separately due to innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated...

Financial economists in recent years have closely examined and intensely debated the performance of initial public offerings using data after the formation of NASDAQ. The paper seeks to shed light on this controversy by undertaking a large, out-of-sample study: we examine the performance for up...

This paper examines the use and consequences of shared compensation plans (profit sharing, profit related pay, SAYE schemes and company stock option plans) in a sample of UK workplaces and firms in the 1990s. The use of these plans has increased over time, in part in response to government...

We measure the behavior of 1,114 CEOs in six countries parsing granular CEO diary data through an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. The algorithm uncovers two distinct behavioral types: "leaders" and "managers". Leaders focus on multi-function, high-level meetings, while managers focus on...

We estimate the impacts of the Climate Change Levy (CCL) on manufacturing plants using panel data from the UK production census. Our identification strategy builds on the comparison of outcomes between plants subject to the CCL and plants that were granted an 80% discount on the levy after...