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....

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation which incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual R&D...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin's Q, sales growth and survival...

This paper assesses different organizational forms in terms of their ability to generate information about investment projects and allocate capital to these projects efficiently. A decentralized approach with small, single-manager firms is most likely to be attractive when information about...

The extensive literature on knowledge management spans several fields, but there are remarkably few studies that address the basic question as to whether knowledge management practices improve organizational performance. I examine that question using a national probability sample of...

This paper examines the direct private equity investment strategies across sovereign wealth funds and their relationship to the funds' organizational structures. SWFs seem to engage in a form of trend chasing, since they are more likely to invest at home when domestic equity prices are higher,...

Mergers and acquisitions are a fast way for a firm to grow. Using plant-level data, we examine how firms redraw their boundaries after acquisitions. We find that there is a large amount of restructuring in a short period following mergers. Acquirers sell 27% and close 19% of acquired plants...