Renata Lemos

@renatalemos.bsky.social

Senior economist at the World Bank

The international empirics of management | Read the latest article by Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos, @raffasadun.bsky.social , @danielascur.bsky.social and @johnvanreenen.bsky.social for PNAS poid.lse.ac.uk/PUBLI...

The international empirics of management

A country's national income broadly depends on the quantity and quality of workers and capital. But how well these factors are managed within and between firms may be a key determinant of a country's productivity and its GDP. Although social scientists have long studied the role of management practices in shaping business performance, their primary tool has been individual case studies. While useful for theory-building, such qualitative work is hard to scale and quantify. We present a large, scalable dataset measuring structured management practices at the business level across multiple countries. We measure practices related to performance monitoring, target-setting, and human resources. We document a set of key stylized facts, which we label 'the international empirics of management'. In all countries, firms with more structured practices tend to also have superior economic performance: they are larger in scale, are more profitable, have higher labor productivity and are more likely to export. This consistency was not obvious ex-ante, and being able to quantify these relationships is valuable. We also document significant variation in practices across and within countries, which is important in explaining differences in the wealth of nations. The positive relationship between firm size and structured management practices is stronger in countries with more open and free markets, suggesting that stronger competition may allow firms with more structured management practices to grow larger, thereby potentially raising aggregate national income.

poid.lse.ac.uk

I've just finished the annual update of our curated links on the Development Impact blog, which sort key posts from the last 13 years. First up, technical topics and methods: how to do RCTs, power calcs, DiD, IV, RDD, PAPs, publication, analysis issues, and more: blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

A Curated List of Our Postings on Technical Topics – Your One-Stop Shop for Methodology

This is a curated list of our technical postings, to serve as a one-stop shop for your technical reading. I’ve focused here on our posts on methodological issues in impact evaluation – we also have a ...

blogs.worldbank.org