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

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. For example, looking at disaggregated data on U.S. manufacturing industries, Syverson (2004a) found that plants at the 90th percentile produced four times as much as the plant in the 10th...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from over 4,000 medium sized manufacturing firms across Asia, Europe and the US. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level performance (e.g. productivity, profitability and stock market...

Do "Anglo-Saxon" management practices generate higher productivity only at the expense of lousy work-life balance (WLB) for workers? Many critics of "neo-libéralisme sauvage" have argued that increased competition from globalisation is damaging employees' quality of life. Others have argued the...

Does good management and higher productivity come at the expense of work-life balance? Or is good work-life balance an important component of the management of successful firms? New research by Nick Bloom, Tobias Kretschmer and John Van Reenen finds evidence for a hybrid view between these two...

Major events like the terrorist attacks on New York of 11 September 2001 generate large but typically short-lived bursts of uncertainty. New research by Nick Bloom explores the effects of such shocks on employment, investment and productivity - and how monetary policy-makers should decide on the...

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.

Until some political mechanism creates incentives to elect moderate representatives who can reach across the ideological divide, the US seems destined to heightened levels of policy uncertainty for many years to come. Some research suggests that such uncertainty, particularly over economic...