Organizations and Markets

The New Empirical Economics of Management

12 May 2014 at 1:46 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

That’s the title of a new review paper by Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur, and John Van Reenen, summarizing the recent large-sample empirical literature on management practices using the World Management Survey (modeled on the older World Values Survey). Here’s the NBER version and here’s an ungated version from the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.

This literature has been rightly criticized for its somewhat coarse, survey-based measures of management practices, but its measures are probably the most precise that can be reliably extracted from a large sample of firms across many countries. In that sense it is on par with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the Economic Freedom Index, and other databases that attempt to capture subtle and ultimately subjective characteristics across a broad sample.

Here’s the abstract of the Bloom et al. paper:

Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP differences across firms and countries. This review paper discusses what has been learned empirically and theoretically from the WMS and other recent work on management practices. Our preliminary results suggest that about a quarter of cross-country and within-country TFP gaps can be accounted for by management practices. Management seems to matter both qualitatively and quantitatively. Competition, governance, human capital and informational frictions help account for the variation in management.

It provides a nice overview for those new to this literature. An earlier review paper by Bloom, Genakos, Sadun, and Van Reenen, “Management Practices Across Firms and Countries,” appeared in the Academy of Management Perspectives in 2011, along with some critical comments by David Waldman, Mary Sully de Luque, and Danni Wang.

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Management Theory, Strategic Management, Theory of the Firm.