Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigration, austerity, real wages and living standards, productivity and business,...

UK productivity stagnated after the Great Recession of 2008-09 and remains about 15 percent below historical trends. This 'productivity puzzle' is due to a mixture of cyclical and structural effects - the fall is not entirely permanent; and has led to a widening of the longstanding gap with...

Better school management is associated with better pupil achievement, according to CEP analysis of the quality of management practices in schools in a range of developed and developing countries. Renata Lemos notes that the quality of school management is related to leadership traits of the head...

There are strong links between the performance of US manufacturing plants and the quality of their systems of monitoring, targets and incentives, according to research by Professor Nicholas Bloom and colleagues. Their analysis of data on more than 30,000 establishments, gathered in the first...

We use an innovative methodology to measure management practices in over 300 manufacturing firms in the UK. We then match this management data to production and energy usage information for establishments owned by these firms. We find that establishments in better managed firms are significantly...

We detail the methodology that we have been using to quantify managerial and organizational practices across firms and countries in recent years. This has been used in many pieces of research at the Centre for Economic Performance. We discuss the pros and cons of such survey tools, describing...

We present a survey of recent contributions in the 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...

We analyze the causal impact of competition on managerial quality (and hospital performance). To address the endogeneity of market structure we analyze the English public hospital sector where entry and exit are controlled by the central government. Because closing hospitals in areas where the...

Can unions substitute a procedural justice role for their traditional reliance on establishing a¿common rule¿? The decline of ¿bureaucratic¿ models of employee management and the riseof performance pay and performance management conflicts with the common rule asmanagement seek to tie rewards...

A classic question in industrial organization is whether competition raises productivity and if so, through what mechanism? I discuss recent empirical evidence from both large-scale databases and specific industries which suggests that tougher competition does indeed raise productivity and one...