What Drives Differences in Management?
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-32
Abstract
Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of 'structured' management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for about a fifth of the spread of productivity, a similar fraction as that accounted for by R&D and twice as much as explained by IT. We find evidence for four 'drivers' of management: competition, business environment, learning spillovers and human capital. Collectively, these drivers account for about a third of the dispersion of structured management practices.
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:
profitability,
production,
econometric,
macroeconomic,
manufacturing,
enterprise,
manufacturer,
manager,
organizational,
corporate,
managerial,
productivity differences,
productivity analysis,
productivity wage,
profit,
revenue,
competitor,
management,
spillover,
productivity firms,
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Metropolitan Statistical Area,
Census of Manufactures,
Annual Survey of Manufactures,
American Economic Association,
National Science Foundation,
Ordinary Least Squares,
Total Factor Productivity,
National Bureau of Economic Research,
Quarterly Journal of Economics,
Journal of Political Economy,
American Economic Review,
Journal of Econometrics,
University of Chicago,
Princeton University Press,
Longitudinal Business Database,
World Bank,
Michigan Institute for Teaching and Research in Economics,
University of California Los Angeles,
Journal of Labor Economics,
Journal of Economic Perspectives,
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American Community Survey,
Patent and Trademark Office,
Sloan Foundation,
National Academy of Sciences,
Kauffman Foundation,
Management and Organizational Practices Survey
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