Understanding how differences in management "best practices" affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics and public policy. The World Management Survey (WMS) project was born almost two decades ago with...

This paper uses a novel firm level data set to investigate the impact of a unique quality management practice on the production and productivity of a large-scale garments manufacturer in Pakistan. The analysis provides evidence that production complexity is an important element in determining...

We study the effects of managerial practices in schools on students' outcomes. We measure managerial practices using the World Management Survey, a methodology that enables us to construct robust measures of management quality comparable across countries. We find substantial heterogeneity in...

We study if Italian teachers do apply gender discrimination when judging students. To this aim, we use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the availability of both teachers (non-blind) and standardized test (blind) scores in math and language that Italian students receive during...

We study how managerial practices of school principals affect student performance and aspirations. We link administrative data on secondary Italian students to the management scores of their school principals in 2011 and 2015 based on the World Management Survey methodology. The frequent...

This paper studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the arguably unambiguous net benefits of the...

This paper examines how productivity effects of human capital and innovation vary at different points of the conditional productivity distribution. Our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6,634 enterprises in Germany and 14,586 enterprises in the Netherlands over the period...

The firm's stock of human capital is an important determinant of its ability to innovate. As such, any increase in this stock through firm-sponsored training might lead to more innovation. We test this hypothesis using detailed data on firms' human capital investments and innovation performance,...

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some...

The supply of women into senior management has changed little despite well-intentioned efforts. We argue that the biggest effect is from supply-side factors that inhibit females' decision to enter competitions: Women are under-confident about winning, men are over-confident; women are more risk...