Management as a Technology?

By Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen. Social Science Research Network, 2016

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain company and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries. We find large cross-country differences in the adoption of basic management practices, with the US having the highest size-weighted average management score. We present a formal model of "Management as a Technology", and structurally estimate it using panel data to recover parameters including the depreciation rate and adjustment costs of managerial capital (both found to be larger than for tangible non-managerial capital). Our model also predicts (i) a positive effect of management on firm performance; (ii) a positive relationship between product market competition and average management quality (part of which stems from the larger covariance between management with firm size as competition strengthens); and (iii) a rise (fall) in the level (dispersion) of management with firm age. We find strong empirical support for all of these predictions in our data. Finally, building on our model, we find that differences in management practices account for about 30% of cross-country total factor productivity differences.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb8728c3c6762500aee8afa0359969da947b6323

Citations in the corpus

• Management and Shocks to Worker Productivity (2019, unknown): “A few recent studies have sought to understand which particular practices or skills matter most, though much work remains to be done in this regard (Bandiera et al., 2017; Bloom et al., 2018a, 2016; Gosnell et al., 2019; Hoffman and Tadelis, 2018).”