A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...

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...

Beginning in 2008, we ran a randomized controlled trial that changed management practices in a set of Indian weaving firms (Bloom et al. 2013). In 2017 we revisited the plants and found three main results. First, while about half of the management practices adopted in the original experimental...

This paper uses new data to study school management and productivity in India. We report four main results. First, management quality in public schools is low, and ~2σ below high-income countries with comparable data. Second, private schools have higher management quality, driven by much...

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...

Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated, producing distributions that are too narrow: realized market returns are within the executives' 80% confidence intervals only...

We exploit a unique combination of administrative sources and survey data to study the match between firms and managers. The data includes manager characteristics, such as risk aversion and talent; firm characteristics, such as ownership; detailed measures of managerial practices relative to...

Mutual fund managers can outperform the market by picking stocks or timing the market successfully. Previous work has estimated picking and timing skill, assuming that each manager is endowed with a fixed amount of each and found some evidence of picking skills and little evidence of timing...

This paper studies optimal policy in a business-cycle setting in which firms have a blurry understanding of the state of the economy due to informational or cognitive constraints. The latter are not only the source of nominal rigidity but also an impediment in the coordination of production. The...

Financial economists have long been puzzled by investor demand for actively managed funds that generate, on average, negative after-fee, risk-adjusted returns. To shed new light on this puzzle, we exploit the fact that funds in different market segments compete for different types of retail...