What Drives Differences in Management?
56 Pages Posted: 2 May 2017
There are 3 versions of this paper
What Drives Differences in Management?
What Drives Differences in Management?
Date Written: April 2017
Abstract
Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of “structured” management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for about a fifth of the spread of productivity, a similar fraction as that accounted for by R&D, and twice as much as explained by IT. We find evidence for four “drivers” of management: competition, business environment, learning spillovers and human capital. Collectively, these drivers account for about a third of the dispersion of structured management practices.
Keywords: Competition, learning, Management, productivity
JEL Classification: L2, M2, O32, O33
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