In this article we study differences in the returns to R&D investment between firms that sell in international markets and firms that only sell in the domestic market. We use German firm-level data from the high-tech manufacturing sector to estimate a dynamic structural model of a firm's...

This paper examines the links between internationalisation, innovation and productivity in service enterprises. For this purpose, we use micro data from the Community Innovation Survey 2008 in Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom, and estimate an augmented structural model. Our empirical...

What is the optimal form of firm organization during "bad times"? Using two large micro datasets on firm decentralization from US administrative data and 10 OECD countries, we find that firms that delegated more power from the Central Headquarters to local plant managers prior to the Great...

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...

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...

Understanding how differences in management "best practices" affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics and public policy. The World Management Survey (WMS) project was born almost two decades ago with...

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...

Economic theory suggests that financing constraints may occur due to capital market imperfections. These particularly affect investments in innovation projects as such projects are typically characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, complexity and specificity. Financing innovation...

This article investigates how a firm's financial strength affects its dynamic decision to invest in R&D. We estimate a dynamic model of R&D choice using data for German firms in high-tech manufacturing industries. The model incorporates a measure of the firm's financial strength, derived from...

Using firm-level data from the German manufacturing sector, we estimate a dynamic, structural model of the firm’s decision to invest in R&D and quantify the cost and longrun benefit of this investment. The model incorporates and quantifies linkages between the firm’s R&D investment, product...