There is a widespread sense that over the last two decades firms have been decentralizing decisions to employees further down the managerial hierarchy. Economists have developed a range of theories to account for delegation, but there is less empirical evidence, especially across countries. This...

Economists have long puzzled why there are such astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. For example, looking as disaggregated data on U.S. manufacturing industries, Syverson (2004a) found that plants at the 90th percentile produced four times as much as the plant in...

The last three decades have witnessed an explosion of theoretical work on the organization of firms (Robert Gibbons and John Roberts, 2009). In parallel, there has been a massive increase in access to micro data which has revealed huge dispersions in productivity. For example, within narrow...

Many critics of free-market liberalism argue that higher product-market competition and the "Anglo-Saxon" management practices it stimulates increases productivity only at the expense of employees' work-life balance (WLB). The empirical basis of these claims is unclear. To address this issue we...

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals that are closer to universities offering both medical education and business education have...