A classic question in industrial organization is whether competition raises productivity and if so, through what mechanism? I discuss recent empirical evidence from both large-scale databases and specific industries which suggests that tougher competition does indeed raise productivity and one...

Chinese economic growth has been spectacular in the last 30 years. We investigate the role of International Joint Ventures with Technology Transfer agreements, an understudied area. Technology transfer is the traditional mechanism for developing countries to "catch up" and has been a key...

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...

Are poor management practices holding back middle-income countries? The authors look at evidence for private firms and public organisations in India - in manufacturing, retail, healthcare and education.

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...

We use an innovative methodology to measure management practices in over 300 manufacturing firms in the UK. We then match this management data to production and energy usage information for establishments owned by these firms. We find that establishments in better managed firms are significantly...

We examine the "home bias" of international knowledge spillovers as measured by the speed of patent citations (i.e. knowledge spreads slowly over international boundaries). We present the first compelling econometric evidence that the geographical localization of knowledge spillovers has fallen...

How much does US-based R&D benefit other countries and through what mechanisms? We test the "technologysourcing" hypothesis that foreign research labs located on US soil tap into US R&D spillovers and improvehome country productivity. Using panels of UK and US firms matched to patent data we...

The commercial value of basic knowledge depends on the arrival of follow-up developments mostly from outside the boundaries of the inventing firm. Private returns would depend on the extent the inventing firm internalizes these follow-up developments. Such internalization is less likely to occur...