In this chapter we examine the relationship between Human Resource Management (HRM) and productivity. HRM includes incentive pay (individual and group) as well as many non-pay aspects of the employment relationship such as matching (hiring and firing) and work organization (e.g. teams,...

The productivity of firms in developing countries appears to be extremely low. Prior work, such as that summarized in James Tybout (2000) and World Bank (2004), has highlighted a set of issues around infrastructure, informality, regulations, trade policies, and human capital that reduce the...

Between 2008 and 2010, the authors worked with a leading global consulting company to attempt to improve management in Indian textile firms. They conducted a randomized experiment involving 28 plants in 17 firms in the woven cotton fabric industry. These were large firms, with an average of 270...

The prospects for the economy depend crucially on the spending decisions that households and businesses make. Those decisions may depend, not just on their views on the most likely future outcome, but also on the degree of uncertainty around their expectations. Measuring and understanding those...

This article uses data from the Decision Maker Panel, a large and representative survey of UK businesses, to better understand how the UK’s decision to leave the EU and the Covid pandemic have affected business investment. It also examines how businesses expect to react to the corporate tax...

This study details the effects of policy conflicts and fiscal crises in the United States and Europe. The impact of economic policy on the economy is measured to generate a proxy for policy uncertainty using three groups of observable measures and combining them into one index of Economic Policy...

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain firm and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries. We find large cross-country differences in the adoption...

Recent research suggests that much of the cross-firm variation in measured productivity is due to differences in use of advanced management practices. Many of these practices - including monitoring, goal setting, and the use of incentives - are mediated through employee decision-making and...

We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence - including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles - indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our US index spikes near...