The international empirics of management.

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.

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Publication Details

Journal
UNC Libraries
Published
2024-11-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.17615/ewzb-f555
Primary Topic
Global and Cross-Cultural Management
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

The international empirics of management.

John Van Reenen, Franklin Qian, Charlotte Meng, Hongbin Li et al.
UNC Libraries
Global and Cross-Cultural Management
article

The international empirics of management.

John Van Reenen, Franklin Qian, Charlotte Meng, Hongbin Li, Atsushi Ohyama, Roope Ohlsbom, Florian Zimmermann, Ryo Kambayashi, Renata Lemos, Scott Ohlmacher, Nicholas Bloom, Tatsuro Senga, Mika Maliranta, Leonardo Iacovone, John Miles Touya, Daniela Scur, Andrea Linarello, Megha Patnaik, Raffaella Sadun, Mariana Pereira-López, Denis Medvedev, Jesse Groenewegen, Arti Grover, Marie‐Christine Laible, Natalia Mandirola, Morten Bennedsen, M. Ali Choudhary, Lucia Foster, Sjoerd Hardeman
article en

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.

UNC Libraries
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 70%
Global and Cross-Cultural Management
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