In an RCT, a large retail chain’s CEO sets new goals for the managers of the treated stores by asking them “to do what they can” to reduce the employee quit rate. The treatment decreases the quit rate by a fifth to a quarter, lasting nine months before petering out, but reappearing after a...

We study the effects of managerial practices in schools on students' outcomes. We measure managerial practices using the World Management Survey, a methodology that enables us to construct robust measures of management quality comparable across countries. We find substantial heterogeneity in...

We study how managerial practices of school principals affect student performance and aspirations. We link administrative data on secondary Italian students to the management scores of their school principals in 2011 and 2015 based on the World Management Survey methodology. The frequent...

We provide evidence for heterogeneous consumer preferences for product quality and game outcome uncertainty (GOU) in Major League Baseball. Using attendance data from 2013 to 2019, we explore functional data clustering techniques to detect common patterns in predictive margins of team-specific...

This paper presents a novel methodology to measure international managerial skill, which has not been directly measured in the specialized management quality surveys. The international managerial quality variable captures the manager’s organizational capital contribution to improve production...

This paper proposes and estimates a two-step methodology to measure international managerial skill and calculate its impact on firm performance, using a sample of the biggest private Colombian exporting firms. The first step quantifies the manager’s organizational capital contribution to...

We explore whether the introduction of trust based working hours is related to the subsequent innovation performance of firms. Employing a panel data set of over 5,000 German establishments, we implement a propensity score matching approach where we only consider firms that did not use trust...

Complementarity between performance pay and other organizational design elements has been argued to be one potential explanation for stark differences in the observed productivity gains from performance pay adoption. Using detailed data on internal organization for a nationally representative...

This paper investigates the performance of Germany's three-pillar banking system in providing financial services nationwide, regarding different outreach indicators. At the federal state level, bank outreach shows South-North and West-East gaps. Combining regional and bank data at the district...

Private equity owned firms have more leverage, more intense compensation contracts, and higher productivity than comparable firms. We develop a theory of buyouts in oligopolistic markets that explains these facts. Private equity firms are more aggressive in inducing restructuring compared to...