In an RCT, a large retail chain’s CEO sets new goals for the managers of the treated stores by asking them “to do what they can” to reduce the employee quit rate. The treatment decreases the quit rate by a fifth to a quarter, lasting nine months before petering out, but reappearing after a...

Warren Buffett once famously stated that airlines were infamous for destroying shareholder value . His hindsight proposition to better have taken the Wright brothers out of the sky violently surely was a pointed one, if not entirely serious. This paper seeks to shed some light on the challenges...

We examine the relationship between establishment-level health measures, Anglo-Saxon management practices and labor productivity, as well as median wages. Based on the observation that management practices are positively associated with establishment outcomes, we test whether health measures...

Professional judges receive a fixed salary and are largely exempt from disciplinary sanctions. How can performance still be secured? Judges share a culture consisting of work-related norms and values, derive status from their standing within the professional community, and are susceptible to...

Professional judges receive a fixed salary and are largely exempt from disciplinary sanctions. How can performance still be secured? Judges share a culture consisting of work-related norms and values, derive status from their standing within the professional community, and are susceptible to...

This paper presents a novel methodology to measure international managerial skill, which has not been directly measured in the specialized management quality surveys. The international managerial quality variable captures the manager’s organizational capital contribution to improve production...

Almost all CEO and executive bonus plans have serious design flaws that limit their benefits dramatically. Such poorly designed executive bonus plans destroy value by providing incentives to manipulate the timing of earnings, mislead the board about organizational capabilities, take on excessive...

We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of US companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high purpose firms come in two forms:...

This paper proposes and estimates a two-step methodology to measure international managerial skill and calculate its impact on firm performance, using a sample of the biggest private Colombian exporting firms. The first step quantifies the manager’s organizational capital contribution to...

Warren Buffett once famously stated that airlines were infamous for destroying shareholder value . His hindsight proposition to better have taken the Wright brothers out of the sky violently surely was a pointed one, if not entirely serious. This paper seeks to shed some light on the challenges...