This paper discusses the optimal firm size in the presence of influence activities, and the level of individual rent-seeking dependent on the economic situation of the firm. Since firm size has a discouraging effect on the level of individual rent-seeking but also a quantity effect as the number...

According to New Institutional Economics, two or more individuals will found an organization, if it leads to a benefit compared to market allocation. A natural consequence will then be internal rent seeking. We discuss the interrelation between profits, rent seeking and the foundation of...

Based on a novel dataset, the "German Management and Organizational Practices" (GMOP) Survey, we calculate establishment specific management scores following Bloom and van Reenen as indicators of management quality. We find substantial heterogeneity in management practices across establishments...

We investigate whether firms' "global engagement", either in the form of exporting or opening up affiliates abroad, is related to the change in their management performance. Using new and unique data from a recent large scale firm survey of management practices in Germany, we calculate...

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...

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain company and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries. We find large cross-country differences in the...

This paper uses a novel firm level data set to investigate the impact of a unique quality management practice on the production and productivity of a large-scale garments manufacturer in Pakistan. The analysis provides evidence that production complexity is an important element in determining...

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000...

Using detailed survey data on management practices, this paper uses recent advances in unconditional quantile analysis to study the changes in the within country distribution of management quality associated with country convergence to the managerial frontier. It then decomposes the contribution...

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obtain the...