A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...

The aim of this paper is to explore the links between brand equity, consumer learning and consumer choice processes in general, and considering two recent trends in the market place: store brands and the Internet. We first review the advances that have occurred in brand equity research in...

In this paper we use interview data to explore the 'new shareholder activism' of mainstream UK institutional investors. We describe contemporary practices of corporate governance monitoring and engagement and how they vary across institutions, and explore the motivations behind them. Existing...

We draw on a series of in-depth interviews with senior managers from institutional investors and large listed corporations to explore how different conceptualizations of institutional investors, their role in the corporate governance process, and their interactions with corporate management, are...

Purpose - To explore the effects of meetings between company executives and fund managers. Design/methodology/approach - Recognizes the increasing importance of these face-to-face meetings, reviews relevant research and draws on information from interviews with finance directors and investor...

Government has been pressing one group in civil society - financial institutions - to regulate the behavior of another group - the companies in which they invest. We consider the implications of this and assess the prospects for success, drawing on evidence obtained in our recent study of the...

Conventional economic theory, applied to information released by listed companies, equates ‘useful’ with ‘price-sensitive’. Stock exchange rules accordingly prohibit the selective, private communication of price-sensitive information. Yet, even in the absence of such communication, UK...

We present a survey of recent contributions in empirical organizational economics, focusing on management practices and decentralization. Productivity dispersion between firms and countries has motivated the improved measurement of firm organization across industries and countries. There appears...

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. In this paper, we present evidence on a possible explanation for persistent differences in productivity at the firm and the national level -- namely, that such differences largely reflect...

The wave of privatizations Latin America experienced during the 1990s was integral to stabilization programs and a general reordering of states’ roles in the regional economy. Over the past few years, however, these privatizations have come under increasing fire. Their purported adverse...