The productivity of firms in developing countries appears to be extremely low. Prior work, such as that summarized in James Tybout (2000) and World Bank (2004), has highlighted a set of issues around infrastructure, informality, regulations, trade policies, and human capital that reduce the...

Knowledge is key to the success of a firm. Firms and their managers acquire knowledge via channels which are often difficult to track down and quantify. By matching employer-employee data with trade data at the firm level we show that the export experience acquired by managers in previous firms...

We use an innovative methodology to measure management practices in over 300 manufacturing firms in the UK. We then match this management data to production and energy usage information for establishments owned by these firms. We find that establishments in better managed firms are significantly...

A robust result in the literature on strategic incentives pioneered by Fershtman and Judd (1987), Sklivas (1987), and Vickers (1985) is that under quantity competition firm owners induce their managers to make aggressive quantity choices in the product market. We revisit this result in a...

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...

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...

We investigate whether firms' "global engagement", either in the form of exporting or opening up affiliates abroad, is related to the change in their management performance. Using new and unique data from a recent large scale firm survey of management practices in Germany, we calculate...

The Census Bureau's 2015 Management and Organizational Practices Survey collected innovative 5-bin data on own future outcomes and probabilities for shipments, employment, capital and materials expenditures at 35,000 manufacturing plants. About 85% of plants provide logically sensible responses...