The international empirics of management

Scur, Daniela, Ohlmacher, Scott W., Van Reenen, John ORCID: 0000-0001-9153-2907, Bennedsend, Morten, Bloom, Nick, Choudhary, M. Ali, Foster, Lucia, Groenewegen, Jesse, Grover, Arti, Hardemanh, Sjoerd, Iacovone, Leonardo, Kambayashi, Ryo, Laible, Marie-Christine, Lemos, Renata, Li, Hongbin, Linarello, Andrea, Maliranta, Mika, Medvedevi, Denis, Mengo, Charlotte, Touya, John Miles, Mandirola, Natalia, Ohlsbom, Roope, Ohyamas, Atsushi, Patnaik, Megha, Pereira-López, Mariana, Sadun, Raffaella, Senga, Tatsuro, Qian, Franklin and Zimmermann, Florian (2024) The international empirics of management. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121 (45). ISSN 0027-8424

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Abstract

A country’s national income broadly depends on the quantity and quality of workers and capital. But how well these factors are managed within and between firms may be a key determinant of a country’s productivity and its GDP. Although social scientists have long studied the role of management practices in shaping business performance, their primary tool has been individual case studies. While useful for theory-building, such qualitative work is hard to scale and quantify. We present a large, scalable dataset measuring structured management practices at the business level across multiple countries. We measure practices related to performance monitoring, target-setting, and human resources. We document a set of key stylized facts, which we label “the international empirics of management”. In all countries, firms with more structured practices tend to also have superior economic performance: they are larger in scale, are more profitable, have higher labor productivity and are more likely to export. This consistency was not obvious ex-ante, and being able to quantify these relationships is valuable. We also document significant variation in practices across and within countries, which is important in explaining differences in the wealth of nations. The positive relationship between firm size and structured management practices is stronger in countries with more open and free markets, suggesting that stronger competition may allow firms with more structured management practices to grow larger, thereby potentially raising aggregate national income.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Authors
Divisions:	Economics
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Date Deposited:	06 Nov 2024 16:00
Last Modified:	15 Nov 2024 17:21
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/125967

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