John Van Reenen examines the 'unbalancing' of Britain's economy away from manufacturing since 1979.

There are strong links between the performance of US manufacturing plants and the quality of their systems of monitoring, targets and incentives, according to research by Professor Nicholas Bloom and colleagues. Their analysis of data on more than 30,000 establishments, gathered in the first...

Technology has transformed the once powerful office of ambassador into a glorified sales position, while nurses, teaching assistants and medical technicians all benefit from the ICT revolution. According to an empirical study by Professor John Van Reenen and colleagues, these contrasting...

John Van Reenen examines the 'unbalancing' of Britain's economy away from manufacturing since 1979.

Does good management and higher productivity come at the expense of work-life balance? Or is good work-life balance an important component of the management of successful firms? New research by Nick Bloom, Tobias Kretschmer and John Van Reenen finds evidence for a hybrid view between these two...

Making video clips of a song unavailable on YouTube has no effect on its sales on iTunes; but album sales suffer when video clips of a song from it are made unavailable on YouTube. These findings of a study by Tobias Kretschmer and Christian Peukert suggest that we need not worry too much about...

A common view is that the performance of the UK economy between 1997 and 2010 under Labour was very weak and that the current economic problems are a consequence of poor policies in this period. In this report, we analyse the historical performance of the UK economy since 1997 compared with...

Europe's top prize for economic research John Van Reenen has been jointly awarded the Yrjö Jahnsson Award in Economics 2009.

Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen analyse the role of management practices in driving firm performance and national productivity.

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...