Manufacturing in America has become significantly more data-intensive. We investigate the adoption, performance effects and organizational complementarities of data-driven decision making (DDD) in the U.S. Using data collected by the Census Bureau for 2005 and 2010, we observe the extent to...

Recent years have seen dramatic changes in data storage and processing technologies. New opportunities to collect and leverage data have led many managers to change how they make decisions — relying less on intuition and more on data. In this paper we provide the first systematic empirical...

We investigate whether the organizational design of manufacturing production is sensitive to important advances in information technology (IT) – and under what conditions. Using U.S. Census Bureau data for over 5,600 plants from 1992 to 2002, we observe both specific uses of IT and whether...

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...

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...