TY - JOUR AU - Bloom,Nicholas AU - Genakos,Christos AU - Sadun,Raffaella AU - Reenen,John Van TI - Management Practices Across Firms and Countries JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 17850 PY - 2012 Y2 - February 2012 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17850 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17850.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 Christos Genakos Department of Economics Athens University of Economics and Business 76 Patission Str. Athens, 10434 GREECE Tel: (+30) 210 8203 353 E-Mail: cgenakos@aueb.gr Raffaella Sadun Harvard Business School Morgan Hall 233 Soldiers Field Boston, MA 02163 Tel: 617/495-6190 Fax: 617/495-0355 E-Mail: rsadun@hbs.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 AB - For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best managed. Firms in developing countries, such as Brazil, China and India tend to be poorly managed. American retail firms and hospitals are also well managed by international standards, although American schools are worse managed than those in several other developed countries. We also find substantial variation in management practices across organizations in every country and every sector, mirroring the heterogeneity in the spread of performance in these sectors. One factor linked to this variation is ownership. Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed. Stronger product market competition and higher worker skills are associated with better management practices. Less regulated labor markets are associated with improvements in incentive management practices such as performance based promotion. ER -