Research
Publications
The International Empirics of Management(with Daniela Scur, Scott Ohlmacher, John Van Reenen et al.)
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2024
Paper Online Appendix Replication Package
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.
(with Andrea Lamorgese, Andrea Linarello & Fabiano Schivardi)
Management Science, May 2024
Paper Online Appendix Replication Package
We use the spread of COVID-19 in Italy, the first Western country hit by the pandemic, to investigate the role of structured management practices in responding to a large shock. We exploit a survey eliciting expected sales growth for 2020 to set up a Difference-in-Difference analysis with repeated cross-sections, leveraging the fact that the data collection began prior to the pandemic and continued throughout its spread. We find a sizable effect of such practices on firm performance: a one-standard-deviation increase in the management score increases expected sales growth by 2.3%, against an average drop of 8.3%. Results are confirmed with actual sales growth. Firms with more structured practices were more likely to implement a comprehensive set of changes, including a more intense use of remote work.
Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, 2020
Paper
Compulsory licensing of sound recordings is practiced in different countries, though the trajectories and rationale for arriving at this framework may differ. Developing countries often introduce measures to protect “infant” industries, but policy persistence can make subsequent changes hard. In 2010, the Copyright Board of India passed an order prescribing 2% of net advertising revenues to be paid by radio stations as compulsory license fees to copyright owners, citing the infancy of the private radio industry and the lack of access to music in India. Since the original order, the private radio industry has matured in size, coverage and listenership. Access to music today is facilitated through a far-reaching radio network, as well as widespread mobile and internet usage. The original order will be reviewed in September 2020. Given the maturation of the private radio industry over the past decade, this paper recommends India transitioning to the perspective considered for countries with mature radio industries. But how can the regulator determine the fair price of music closest to that found in a competitive market? Several strategies demonstrated in the literature can be used to establish a baseline valuation, following which adjustments can be made to account for any spillovers between the two industries.
(with Nick Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Itay Saporta-Eksten & John Van Reenen)
American Economic Review, May 2019
Paper Online Appendix Replication Package MDP data
Partnering with the US Census Bureau, we implement a new survey of “structured” management practices in two waves of 35,000 manufacturing plants in 2010 and 2015. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40 percent of this variation across plants within the same firm. Management practices account for more than 20 percent of the variation in productivity, a similar, or greater, percentage as that accounted for by R&D, ICT, or human capital. We find evidence of two key drivers to improve management. The business environment, as measured by right-to-work laws, boosts incentive management practices. Learning spillovers, as measured by the arrival of large “Million Dollar Plants” in the county, increases the management scores of incumbents.
Working Papers
Sustainable Remote Workplace: Insights from a Conjoint Survey Experiment on Employees’ Work-from-Home Preferences(with Beata Wozniak-Jechorek, Amanda Sahar d’Urso & Chloe Thurston)
Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Remote and hybrid work have become central to organizational life, yet questions remain about how to design arrangements that are sustainable over time. The sustainability of remote workplaces depends not only on digital infrastructures and organizational design but also on how employees evaluate trade-offs across multiple job attributes. We propose a preference-based sustainability model of remote work, rooted in employees’ trade-off logic. Using a conjoint experiment with 627 full-time U.S. workers, we estimate workplace preferences across six attributes: work location, salary, expense reimbursement, schedule flexibility, supervision, and support resources. Results show employees’ preferences are conditional rather than absolute. Employees strongly favor remote-heavy roles, but this preference depends on accompanying features. Workers tolerate monitoring, unchanged salaries, or modest cost burdens when granted full remote autonomy, but become less willing to make such concessions as office requirements increase. A salary premium of 15% can offset the loss of full remote work, though only in hybrid settings that remain flexible (e.g. up to three days in the office). These findings indicate employees weigh benefits and sacrifices holistically rather than evaluating attributes in isolation. For organizations seeking to bring workers back to the office, incentives beyond salary—such as flexibility, support, or cost-sharing—may play a critical role in sustaining acceptance.
Reject and Resubmit, Review of Finance
I study the effects of bank failures and house price fluctuations on small business credit in the Great Recession using novel transaction-level data for more than 140,000 micro and small firms in the US. Bank failures lead to declines in credit for small firms for up to six quarters, however, micro firms are not significantly affected by this shock. In contrast, house price fluctuations affect the credit of micro firms but have no significant impact on small firms. My results are consistent with the relative dependence on collateral versus lending relationships for micro and small firms seen in survey data.
Under Review
CEPR Discussion Paper
I study India’s 2017 Goods and Services Tax (GST) to examine how self-enforcing tax design generates formalization cascades through supply chains. GST created incentives for formal procurement by allowing input tax credits only for purchases from registered suppliers. Using firm-level data on 12,024 firms, I find that firms at the mean pre-reform exposure to non-creditable taxes increased documented input purchases by 6 percent while reducing tax payments by 8 percent. Effects double over five years, consistent with formalization propagating sequentially upstream—a dynamic pattern that provides the first empirical evidence on the dynamics of VAT-driven formalization cascades. At the aggregate level, large firms’ share of national GST collections fell from 46 to 30 percent, implying smaller enterprises entering the formal tax net. The interquartile range of effective tax rates collapsed by 72 percent, reflecting the replacement of heterogeneous cascading taxes with uniform credits.
Under Review
CESifo Working Paper
Metal markets are an important but understudied aspect of the global energy transition. This paper demonstrates differential metal price responses to the Paris Agreement based on their role in the energy transition. We use a difference-in-differences design with daily price data from 2001 to 2024 for eight industrial metals. The treatment group distinguishes between traditional green metals (Copper, Aluminium, Nickel), which are established in renewable energy infrastructure, versus emerging green metals (Lithium), that are critical for storage. The control group includes non-green metals (Zinc, Lead, Tin, and Iron Ore). We find traditional green metals experienced 31% price decline relative to control metals following the Paris Agreement, while Lithium exhibited a 120% price increase.
Under Review
India’s Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS), announced in October 2025, is primarily a strategic response to the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which enters full implementation in 2026. By targeting 800 industrial units in trade-exposed sectors like Aluminium, Cement, and Steel, India seeks to establish a domestic carbon price that can mitigate the financial impact of EU border levies. This viewpoint argues that while the CCTS is an effective immediate trade defense, its baseline-and-credit architecture creates structural tensions. Specifically, the use of intensity-based targets effectively treats emissions up to a baseline as free rights, which may be interpreted by international regulators as an implicit production subsidy. Furthermore, the significant price gap between projected domestic prices of €2.50 and EU levels of €80–100 threatens the long-term effectiveness of the shield. To ensure the CCTS evolves into a credible driver of both trade equivalence and domestic decarbonization, we propose strengthening Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) infrastructure and committing to a phased transition toward absolute emission caps.
Submitted
CEPR Discussion Paper
Remote work has transformed the globalization of services, moving beyond arm’s-length trade toward complex within-firm reorganization. Over the past two decades, multinational firms have increasingly established Global Capability Centers (GCCs)—large captive offshore service units through which knowledge-intensive tasks are performed at scale. We develop a model of heterogeneous service firms in which the scale and organization of remote work are endogenous choices. Adapting the logic of Helpman, Melitz, and Yeaple (2004) to the services context, firms trade off the variable cost savings of remote labor against the fixed costs of coordination and organizational capacity. Moderately productive firms reorganize through partial outsourcing, while only the most productive firms exceed a unique adoption threshold and establish GCCs, which offer the lowest variable costs but require the highest fixed investments. A general equilibrium extension characterizes a “self-limiting expansion” mechanism: the growth of large-scale remote work raises offshore labor demand and wages, endogenously tightening the productivity requirements for further adoption. The paper provides a unified framework connecting remote work to theories of multinational firms and positions GCCs as the services analogue of horizontal foreign direct investment.
Work in Progress
Big India vs. Big U.S.(with Mert Akan, Nick Bloom, Shelby Buckman & Pete Klenow)
Slides
We compare large (50 or more employee) manufacturing establishments in India and the U.S. We find the labor productivity gap among these establishments is substantial relative to the overall gap between all establishments in Indian vs. U.S. manufacturing. Large establishments therefore contribute a major portion of the gap, not just the smaller establishments that have received so much attention. We decompose the gap into management and worker quality, physical capital intensity, allocative efficiency, and a residual. The residual may reflect differences in innovation, as we document differences in residual demand (e.g., product quality and customer base) and new product introductions.
(with Mert Akan, Nick Bloom, Shelby Buckman, Pete Klenow, Ananya Kotia & Janak Nabar)
We study how family control and professionalization shape firm performance and organization using nationwide administrative records on over 350,000 registered Indian firms spanning the 1980s to the present, including director genealogies and tenure histories. We construct firm-year measures of family presence on boards and deploy event-study designs around leadership transitions and shifts toward professional boards. Supermajority family boards are systematically smaller and less productive: revenues, profits, and exporting are lower when more than three quarters of directors are family, relative to otherwise similar firms. Dynamic estimates around patriarch exit show post-transition improvements in operating outcomes and profitability ratios. Together, the evidence maps who professionalizes, when, and with what consequences for scale, productivity, and managerial practices in Indian firms.
(with Andrea Lamorgese, Andrea Linarello & Fabiano Schivardi)
Slides
We examine the role of complementarity between management and remote work in explaining the heterogeneous adoption of remote work across firms in Italy during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as its persistence afterward. To measure this, we exploit the exogenous variation in remote work adoption driven by the heterogeneous intensity of the lockdown across waves of COVID-19 in 2020 and across different Italian provinces. Our estimates suggest that labor productivity is hampered by the adoption of remote work in firms with less structured management practices, whereas it appears unchanged in firms adopting more structured ones. We consequently find that firms with more structured management practices sustain relatively higher remote work in the new normal.
(with Sara Casella & Kieran Larkin)
Slides
Female labor market outcomes have improved dramatically over the past half century, yet a significant and persistent child penalty remains. A leading explanation is the prevalence of “greedy” jobs that reward long, inflexible hours—features incompatible with the unequal burden of child care on women. We develop a dynamic life-cycle model with frictional occupational choice and endogenous human capital accumulation to quantify the role of workplace flexibility in mitigating gender gaps. We use the model to study how structural changes in work technology, specifically the post-2020 expansion of Work-from-Home (WFH), reshape the allocation of household time and, in turn, occupational sorting, human capital accumulation, and gender gaps over the life cycle. We find that while short-run adjustments are muted by switching frictions, the long-run general equilibrium effects are substantial. WFH induces younger cohorts of women to enter non-linear occupations, narrowing the gender gap in earnings and human capital over the life-cycle.
Tax systems in poor countries are characterized by high rates, non-transparent exemptions and poor enforcement resource constraints on the administration resulting in poor enforcement. Such an environment allows for the possibility of tax avoidance and evasion, especially when owners of the firm have high-powered incentives and managerial control. This paper finds evidence that manufacturing firms where there is continued involvement of the founding family pay less excise tax on their sales. These firms tend to be smaller and less productive, indicating that the implicit subsidy they receive in terms of lower effective tax rates may help them survive, diverting resources away from larger, more productive firms which would have been the main determinants of output and productivity in a more transparent economic environment.
(with Alessandra Allocca & Fabiano Schivardi)
Family firms are the dominant form of ownership worldwide, yet surprisingly little is known about the beliefs guiding founders’ succession decisions. We conduct a novel survey of 729 founders in Italy whose firms experienced a succession between 2013 and 2023. Using a hierarchical latent Dirichlet model for categorical survey responses, we uncover two distinct founder types. Relational founders emphasize family reputation, children’s aspirations, stakeholder relationships, and the preservation of family control. In contrast, Professional founders believe external managers can bring in additional skills and networks to expand firm value. Combining with administrative data on succession outcomes, we find that Relational founders are more likely to choose internal family succession. Our results suggest that the persistence of family management reflects heterogeneous beliefs about the sources of firm value, rather than institutional constraints or financial incentives alone.
(with Tanay Raj Bhatt)
This paper models fair use and the presence of both original artistic and derivative works in a market where consumers substitute between the two. Artists sell their rights to a distributor who pays royalty. The distributor competes with other distributors who sell derivative works but do not pay royalty to the artist under the fair use regime. We derive the growth rate of creative works and find it to be concave in the fair use parameter. We compare the growth rate under three different price regimes: one where producers of original and derived works can both sell at monopolist competitive prices, second, where the producers of derived works cannot charge markups above marginal costs, and third, where the social planner redistributes the profits from derivative works back to artists in the form of subsidies.
Million Dollar Plants and the Scope of Local Subsidies
Carbon Misallocation
Family Capital
(with Daniela Scur & Fabiano Schivardi)
Policy reports & reviews
The Importance of Structured Management Practices
(with Nick Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Itay Saporta-Eksten & John Van Reenen)
MIT Sloan Management Review, April 18, 2017
Link
Trends in Copyright Infringement and Enforcement
(with Shohini Sengupta & Aishwarya Giridhar)
Esya Centre monograph, Dec 2019
Link
Measuring India’s Creative Economy
Esya Centre monograph, June 2020
Link
E-retail, consumer demand & the road to recovery
(with Mohit Chawdhry)
Esya Centre monograph, Sept 2020
Link
Batting ahead: Management, innovation and the future of Indian manufacturing
(with Mert Akan, Nick Bloom, Chaitanya Lekharaju, Pete Klenow, PJ Nishok, Janak Nabar)
CTIER report, May 2024
Link Slides Video