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...

Throughout modern business history, contract has been used as an organizational technology that holds counterparties in formal or legally binding agreements. The proliferation of contract prompted the emergence of professional contract managers who played an important but relatively peripheral...

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from over 4,000 medium sized manufacturing firms across Asia, Europe and the US. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level performance (e.g. productivity, profitability and stock market...

How malleable are preferences? This paper provides experimental evidence on the extent to which insurance sellers can influence buyers and whether mandatory information disclosure offsets these effects. The experiment involves 214 subjects seeking or recently obtaining unsecured loans and 25...

This paper explores problems and challenges in the management of expatriate staff in Northern NGOs. It finds that very little research has so far been carried out on this issue despite its importance in international NGO development work. Drawing on a recent case study of a NNGO working in...

This book is about a company which pioneered a major new industry, failed to build on that success, and ended up being taken over and broken up. By comparing this firm with its competitors in the same industry, the book sheds light on one of the hardest of all managerial challenges: what...

Many Decision Analysis interventions can be thought of as helping people to discuss what constitutes value for their organization. One approach to Decision Analysis which takes this view particularly seriously is Decision Conferencing, where valuations assessed locally within particular...

In January 1995, the first Complexity Seminar was held at the London School of Economics, in the UK. This was quite a momentous occasion as it proved to be the turning point for the series of seminars, which had started in December 1992. That seminar and those that followed it, had a profound...

We develop a methodology to collect and analyze data on CEOs' time use. The idea — sketched out in a simple theoretical set-up — is that CEO time is a scarce resource and its allocation can help us identify the firm's priorities as well as the presence of governance issues. We follow 94 CEOs...