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...

Support for many R&D and technology policies relies on empirical evidence that R&D "spills over" between firms. But there are two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative effects from business stealing by product market rivals. We develop a general...

This paper shows that with (partial) irreversibility higher uncertainty reduces the "responsiveness "of investment to demand shocks. Uncertainty increases real option values making firms more cautious when investing or disinvesting. This is confirmed both numerically for a model with a rich mix...

Guided by theories of management by exception, we study the impact of Information and Communication Technology on worker and plant manager autonomy and on span of control. We find, using an original dataset of American and European manufacturing firms, that better information technologies...

We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local plant managers in almost...

Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen analyse the role of management practices in driving firm performance and national productivity.

Nick Bloom and Max Floetotto report that key measures of uncertainty have dropped so rapidly that growth will resume in late 2009.

Nick Bloom and colleagues examine whether well-managed firms are more or less energy-efficient than badly managed firms

CEP researchers have conducted a unique survey of clinicians and hospital managers to explore how well NHS hospitals are managed

An experiment with Indian textile firms, conducted by Nicholas Bloom and colleagues, finds that better management has a huge impact on corporate performance