Understanding productivity and business dynamics requires measuring production outputs and inputs. Through its surveys and use of administrative data, the Census Bureau collects information on production outputs and inputs including labor, capital, energy, and materials. With the introduction of the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), the Census Bureau added information on another component of production: management. It has long been hypothesized that management is an important component of firm success, but until recently the study of management was confined to hypotheses, anecdotes, and case studies. Building upon the work of Bloom and Van Reenen (2007), the first-ever large scale survey of management practices in the United States, the MOPS, was conducted by the Census Bureau for 2010. A second, enhanced version of the MOPS is being conducted for 2015. The enhancement includes two new topics related to management: data and decision making (DDD) and uncertainty. As information technology has expanded plants are increasingly able to utilize data in their decision making. Structured management practices have been found to be complementary to DDD in earlier studies. Uncertainty has policy implications because uncertainty is found to be associated with reduced investment and employment. Uncertainty also plays a role in the targeting component of management.
-
The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS): Cognitive Testing*
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-53
All Census Bureau surveys must meet quality standards before they can be sent to the public for data collection. This paper outlines the pretesting process that was used to ensure that the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) met those standards. The MOPS is the first large survey of management practices at U.S. manufacturing establishments. The first wave of the MOPS, issued for reference year 2010, was subject to internal expert review and two rounds of cognitive interviews. The results of this pretesting were used to make significant changes to the MOPS instrument and ensure that quality data was collected. The second wave of the MOPS, featuring new questions on data in decision making (DDD) and uncertainty and issued for reference year 2015, was subject to two rounds of cognitive interviews and a round of usability testing. This paper illustrates the effort undertaken by the Census Bureau to ensure that all surveys released into the field are of high quality and provides insight into how respondents interpret the MOPS questionnaire for those looking to utilize the MOPS data.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Business-Level Expectations and Uncertainty
December 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-41
The Census Bureau's 2015 Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) utilized innovative methodology to collect five-point forecast distributions over own future shipments, employment, and capital and materials expenditures for 35,000 U.S. manufacturing plants. First and second moments of these plant-level forecast distributions covary strongly with first and second moments, respectively, of historical outcomes. The first moment of the distribution provides a measure of business' expectations for future outcomes, while the second moment provides a measure of business' subjective uncertainty over those outcomes. This subjective uncertainty measure correlates positively with financial risk measures. Drawing on the Annual Survey of Manufactures and the Census of Manufactures for the corresponding realizations, we find that subjective expectations are highly predictive of actual outcomes and, in fact, more predictive than statistical models fit to historical data. When respondents express greater subjective uncertainty about future outcomes at their plants, their forecasts are less accurate. However, managers supply overly precise forecast distributions in that implied confidence intervals for sales growth rates are much narrower than the distribution of actual outcomes. Finally, we develop evidence that greater use of predictive computing and structured management practices at the plant and a more decentralized decision-making process (across plants in the same firm) are associated with better forecast accuracy.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Management in America
January 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-01
The Census Bureau recently conducted a survey of management practices in over 30,000 plants across the US, the first large-scale survey of management in America. Analyzing these data reveals several striking results. First, more structured management practices are tightly linked to better performance: establishments adopting more structured practices for performance monitoring, target setting and incentives enjoy greater productivity and profitability, higher rates of innovation and faster employment growth. Second, there is a substantial dispersion of management practices across the establishments. We find that 18% of establishments have adopted at least 75% of these more structured management practices, while 27% of establishments adopted less than 50% of these. Third, more structured management practices are more likely to be found in establishments that export, who are larger (or are part of bigger firms), and have more educated employees. Establishments in the South and Midwest have more structured practices on average than those in the Northeast and West. Finally, we find adoption of structured management practices has increased between 2005 and 2010 for surviving establishments, particularly for those practices involving data collection and analysis.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Investment and Subjective Uncertainty
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-52
A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000 manufacturing plants. We find three key results. First, investment is strongly and robustly negatively associated with higher uncertainty, with a two standard deviation increase in uncertainty associated with about a 6% reduction in investment. Second, uncertainty is also negatively related to employment growth and overall shipments (sales) growth, which highlights the damaging impact of uncertainty on firm growth. Third, flexible inputs like rental capital and temporary workers show a positive relationship to uncertainty, demonstrating that businesses switch from less flexible to more flexible factor inputs at higher levels of uncertainty.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS): Collection and Processing
December 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-51
The U.S. Census Bureau partnered with a team of external researchers to conduct the first-ever large-scale survey of management practices in the United States, the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), for reference year 2010. With the help of the research team, the Census Bureau expanded and improved the survey for a second wave for reference year 2015. The MOPS is a supplement to the Annual Survey of Manufacturing (ASM), and so the collection and processing strategy for the MOPS built on the methodology for the ASM, while differing on key dimensions to address the unique nature of management relative to other business data. This paper provides detail on the mail strategy pursued for the MOPS, the collection methods for paper and electronic responses, the processing and estimation procedures, and the official Census Bureau data releases. This detail is useful for all those who have interest in using the MOPS for research purposes, those wishing to understand the MOPS data more deeply, and those with an interest in survey methodology.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Developing Content for the
Management and Organizational Practices Survey-Hospitals (MOPS-HP)
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-25
Nationally representative U.S. hospital data does not exist on management practices, which have been shown to be related to both clinical and financial performance using past data collected in the World Management Survey (WMS). This paper describes the U.S. Census Bureau's development of content for the Management and Organizational Practices Survey Hospitals (MOPS-HP) that is similar to data collected in the MOPS conducted for the manufacturing sector in 2010 and 2015 and the 2009 WMS. Findings from cognitive testing interviews with 18 chief nursing officers and 13 chief financial officers at 30 different hospitals across 7 states and the District of Columbia led to using industry-tested terminology, to confirming chief nursing officers as MOPS-HP respondents and their ability to provide recall data, and to eliminating questions that tested poorly. Hospital data collected in the MOPS-HP would be the first nationally representative data on management practices with queries on clinical key performance indicators, financial and hospital-wide patient care goals, addressing patient care problems, clinical team interactions and staffing, standardized clinical protocols, and incentives for medical record documentation. The MOPS-HP's purpose is not to collect COVID-19 pandemic information; however, data measuring hospital management practices prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic are a byproduct of the survey's one-year recall period (2019 and 2020).
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Data in Action: Data-Driven Decision Making in U.S. Manufacturing
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-06
Manufacturing in America has become significantly more data-intensive. We investigate the adoption, performance effects and organizational complementarities of data-driven decision making (DDD) in the U.S. Using data collected by the Census Bureau for 2005 and 2010, we observe the extent to which manufacturing firms track and use data to guide decision making, as well as their investments in information technology (IT) and the use of other structured management practices. Examining a representative sample of over 18,000 plans, we find that adoption of DDD is earlier and more prevalent among larger, older plants belonging to multi-unit firms. Smaller single-establishment firms adopt later but have a higher correlation with performance than similar non-adopters. Using a fixed-effects estimator, we find the average value-added for later DDD adopters to be 3% greater than non-adopters, controlling for other inputs to production. This effect is distinct from that associated with IT and other structured management practices and is concentrated among single-unit firms. Performance improves after plants adopt DDD, but not before ' consistent with a causal relationship. However, DDD-related performance differentials decrease over time for early and late adopters, consistent with firm learning and development of organizational complementarities. Formal complementarity tests suggest that DDD and high levels of IT capital reinforce each other, as do DDD and skilled workers. For some industries, the benefits of DDD adoption appear to be greater for plants that delegate some decision making to frontline workers.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs: An Introduction
November 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-40R
The Census Bureau continually seeks to improve its measures of the U.S. economy as part of its mission. In some cases this means expanding or updating the content of its existing surveys, expanding the use of administrative data, and/or exploring the use of privately collected data. When these options cannot provide the needed data, the Census Bureau may consider fielding a new survey to fill the gap. This paper describes one such new survey, the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE). Innovations in content, format, and process are designed to provide high-quality, timely, frequent information on the activities of one of the important drivers of economic growth: entrepreneurship. The ASE is collected through a partnership of the Census Bureau with the Kauffman Foundation and the Minority Business Development Agency. The first wave of the ASE collection started in fall of 2015 (for reference period 2014) and results will be released in summer 2016. Qualified researchers on approved projects will be able to access micro data from the ASE through the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) network.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
EVIDENCE OF AN 'ENERGY-MANAGEMENT GAP' IN U.S. MANUFACTURING:
SPILLOVERS FROM FIRM MANAGEMENT PRACTICES TO ENERGY EFFICIENCY
April 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-25
In this paper we merge a well-cited survey of firm management practices into confidential U.S. Census microdata to examine whether generic, i.e. non-energy specific, firm management practices, 'spillover' to enhance energy efficiency in the United States. We find the relationship in U.S. plants to be more nuanced than past research on UK plants has suggested. Most management techniques have beneficial spillovers to energy efficiency, but an emphasis on generic targets, conditional on other management practices, results in spillovers that increase energy intensity. Our specification controls for industry specific effects at a detailed 6-digit NAICS level and shows that this result is stronger for firms in energy intensive industries. We interpret the empirical result that generic management practices do not necessarily spillover to improved energy performance as evidence of an 'energy management gap.'
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Measuring U.S. Innovative Activity
March 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-11
Innovation has long been credited as a leading source of economic strength and vitality in the United States because it leads to new goods and services and increases productivity, leading to better living standards. Better measures of innovative activities'activities including but not limited to innovation alone'could improve what we know about the sources of productivity and economic growth. The U.S. Census Bureau either currently collects, or has collected, data on some measures of innovative activities, such as the diffusion of innovations and technologies, human and organizational capital, entrepreneurship and other worker and firm characteristics, and the entry and exit of businesses, that research shows affect productivity and other measures of economic performance. But developing an understanding of how those effects work requires more than just measures of innovative activity. It also requires solid statistical information about core measures of the economy: that is, comprehensive coverage of all industries, including improved measures of output and sales and additional information on inputs and purchased materials at the micro (enterprise) level for the same economic unit over time (so the effects can be measured). Filling gaps in core data would allow us to rule out the possibility that a measure of innovative activity merely proxies for something that is omitted from or measured poorly in the core data, provide more information about innovative activities, and strengthen our ability to evaluate the performance of the entire economy. These gaps can be filled by better integrating existing data and by more structured collections of new data.
View Full
Paper PDF