Timely business-level measures of work from home (WFH) are scarce for the U.S. economy. We review prior survey-based efforts to quantify the incidence and character of WFH and describe new questions that we developed and fielded for the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS). Drawing on more...

This review article tries to answer four questions: (i) what are the stylized facts about uncertainty over time; (ii) why does uncertainty vary; (iii) do fluctuations in uncertainty matter; and (iv) did higher uncertainty worsen the Great Recession of 2007-2009? On the first question both macro...

Uncertainty appears to jump up after major shocks like the Cuban Missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, the OPEC I oil-price shock and the 9/11 terrorist attack. This paper offers a structural framework to analyze the impact of these uncertainty shocks. I build a model with a time varying...

Uncertainty varies strongly over time, rising by 50% to 100% in recessions and by up to 200% after major economic and political shocks. This paper shows that higher uncertainty reduces the responsiveness of R&D to changes in business conditions - a "caution-effect" - making it more persistent...

Many critics of free-market liberalism argue that higher product-market competition and the “Anglo-Saxon” management practices it stimulates increases productivity only at the expense of employees’ work-life balance (WLB). The empirical basis of these claims is unclear. To address this...

Do “Anglo-Saxon” management practices generate higher productivity only at the expense of lousywork-life balance (WLB) for workers? Many critics of “neo-libéralisme sauvage” have argued thatincreased competition from globalisation is damaging employees’ quality of life. Others have...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sizedmanufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerialpractice are strongly associated with productivity, profitability, Tobin’s Q, sales growth and survivalrates....

On 30th October 2003, at a joint Forum of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) and the Councilfor Industry and Higher Education (CIHE) academics, practitioners and policy makers discussed dimensions of theUK’s skills challenge. This report, which summarises the discussions that...

The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US “productivity miracle” is due to a natural advantage of being located in the US then...