There is a widespread sense that over the last two decades firms have been decentralizing decisions to employees further down the managerial hierarchy. Economists have developed a range of theories to account for delegation, but there is less empirical evidence, especially across countries. This...

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...

This paper analyzes one of the best sets of small business data - 1985-2000 U.S. sole proprietorship data that Statistics of Income Division, Internal Revenue Service, produces for researchers. It explains the differences in business owners across the nation from 1985 to 2000 by looking into...

We examine the effect of plant managers on productivity using unique matched manager-plant panel data on US auto assembly plants during 1993-2007. Our econometric approach is two-pronged. Our first approach relies on using the panel nature of our data to measure variation in productivity due to...

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...

This paper is an empirical assessment of the comparative efficiency of governance structures in an environment marked by high uncertainty. We analyze the short-term impact of retail deregulation on the productive efficiency of electric utilities in the United States. We argue that there are...

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...

Economics has long studied how consumers respond to the disclosure of information about firms. We study a case in which the disclosed information is unrelated to the product or firm leadership, but which could still potentially affect consumer patronage through the mechanism of repugnance, as...

This paper summarizes relocation patterns in the U.S. manufacturing industry over the period 1972-1992, using plant- and firm-level data from the U.S. Census of Manufactures. This study contributes to the existing literature on firm dynamics by distinguishing entry due to relocation from entry...

I document the evolution of market power in the U.S. airline industry for the period 1990:Q1-2019:Q4. I recover estimates of markups, defined as the ratio of price to marginal cost, at the airline-time level. Dominant carriers in the industry have substantially increased their markups in the...