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...

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effectiveness of different types of international technology sourcing activities...

We examine the “home bias” of knowledge spillovers (the idea that knowledge spreads more slowly over international boundaries than within them) as mea- sured by the speed of patent citations. We present econometric evidence that the geographical localization of knowledge spillovers has...

We present a heterogeneous-firm model in which management ability increases both pro- duction efficiency and product quality. Combining six micro-datasets on management prac- tices, production and trade in Chinese and American firms, we find broad support for the model's predictions. First,...

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. For example, looking at disaggregated data on U.S. manufacturing industries, Syverson (2004a) found that plants at the 90th percentile produced four times as much as the plant in the 10th...

There is a widespread sense that over the last two decades firms have been decentralizing decisions to employees further down the managerial hierarchy. Economists have developed a range of theories to account for delegation, but there is less empirical evidence, especially across countries. This...

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effectiveness of different types of international technology sourcing activities...

We examine the "home bias" of knowledge spillovers (the idea that knowledge spreads more slowly over international boundaries than within them) as measured by the speed of patent citations. We present econometric evidence that the geographical localization of knowledge spillovers has fallen over...

Economists have long puzzled why there are such astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. For example, looking as disaggregated data on U.S. manufacturing industries, Syverson (2004a) found that plants at the 90th percentile produced four times as much as the plant in...