Understanding how differences in management "best practices" affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both … theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics and public policy. The World Management Survey … (WMS) project was born almost two decades ago with the main goal of developing a new systematic measure of management …

Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across … recent work on management practices. Our preliminary results suggest that about a quarter of cross-country and within …-country TFP gaps can be accounted for by management practices. Management seems to matter both qualitatively and quantitatively …

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management … worse managed than those in several other developed countries. We also find substantial variation in management practices … product market competition and higher worker skills are associated with better management practices. Less regulated labor …

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 …