TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bloom,Nick
AU  - Reenen,John Van
TI  - Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12216
PY  - 2006
Y2  - May 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12216
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12216.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Nicholas Bloom
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: 650/725-3266
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: nbloom@stanford.edu

John Van Reenen
Department of Economics
London School of Economics
Centre for Economic Performance
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
UNITED KINGDOM
Tel: 00 44 207/955-6976
Fax: 00 44 207/955-6848
E-Mail: j.vanreenen@lse.ac.uk
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-05-15
AB  - 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%u2019s Q, sales growth and survival rates. Management practices also display significant cross-country differences with US firms on average better managed than European firms, and significant within-country differences with a long tail of extremely badly managed firms. We find that poor management practices are more prevalent when (a) product market competition is weak and/or when (b) family-owned firms pass management control down to the eldest sons (primo geniture). European firms report lower levels of competition, while French and British firms also report substantially higher levels of primo geniture due to the influence of Norman legal origin and generous estate duty for family firms. We calculate that product market competition and family firms account for about half of the long tail of badly managed firms and up to two thirds of the American advantage over Europe in management practices.
ER  -