Patents citations are a potentially powerful indicator of technological innovation. Analysing the new IFS-Leverhulme database on over 200 major British firms since 1968 we show that patents have an economically and statistically significant impact on firm-level productivity and market value. We...

We derive robust predictions on the effects of uncertainty on short run investment dynamics in a broad class of models with (partial) irreversibility. When their environment becomes more uncertain firms become more cautious and less responsive to demand shocks. This result contrasts with the...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin's Q, sales growth and survival...

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...

We collect original data on the degree of decentralization in several thousand firms located in the US, Europe and Asia. Specifically, we focus on the autonomy of local plant managers from their Corporate Headquarters in their decisions over hiring, investment, production and sales. We find that...

Does good management and higher productivity come at the expense of work-life balance? Or is good work-life balance an important component of the management of successful firms? New research by Nick Bloom, Tobias Kretschmer and John Van Reenen finds evidence for a hybrid view between these two...

Until some political mechanism creates incentives to elect moderate representatives who can reach across the ideological divide, the US seems destined to heightened levels of policy uncertainty for many years to come. Some research suggests that such uncertainty, particularly over economic...

This paper examines the impact of fiscal incentives on the level of R&D investment. An econometric model of R&D investment is estimated using a new panel of data on tax changes and R&D spending in nine OECD countries over a nineteen year period (1979-1997). We find evidence that tax incentives...

Increasing product-market competition is believed to be a driving force behind higher productivity. However, even those critics of globalization who accept this argument claim that there is a hard trade-off because tougher competition comes at the price of reducing work--life balance (WLB)....