Research
Publications
Understanding Employee Trade-Offs in Remote Work: Toward More Sustainable Workplace Design(with Beata Wozniak-Jechorek, Amanda Sahar d’Urso & Chloe Thurston)
Journal of Strategic Information Systems, April 2026
Paper
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.
(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
The Impact of FDIC Failed Bank Resolutions on Small Business CreditReject 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.
Presentations: Centre for Advanced Financial Research and Learning (2019); Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore), Australian National University (Canberra), Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, Bank of Italy (2018); Wharton Finance Department (University of Pennsylvania), Indian School of Business (Hyderabad), Indian Institute of Management (Udaipur), Ashoka University Annual Conference (2017); Stanford University, Department of Economics (2016).
Funding: Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; Kapnick Foundation, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
CEPR Discussion Paper Ideas for India आइडियाज़ फ़ॉर इंडिया The Wire
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.
CESifo Working Paper
Climate commitments are expected to reshape demand for critical minerals, yet little is known about how commodity markets incorporate these expectations into prices. We show that the response depends on supply elasticity: materials with scalable supply respond differently from those with constrained supply because markets anticipate future supply adjustment in the former but persistent scarcity in the latter. Exploiting the 2015 Paris Agreement as a common climate-demand shock, we estimate these effects using daily data on eight industrial metals over 2001–2024. We find that established transition metals with relatively elastic supply (Copper, Aluminium, and Nickel) traded 25.9% lower relative to comparison metals after Paris, whereas supply-constrained Lithium rose by 103.7%. Evidence from futures curves and warehouse inventories is consistent with markets anticipating future supply expansion for established transition metals but persistent scarcity for battery materials. Our findings show that climate commitments reprice commodity markets according to supply elasticity and suggest that commodity prices reveal potential material bottlenecks of the energy transition well before physical shortages emerge.
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.
Presentations: STEG Annual Conference and Theme Workshops, LMU Munich (2025); Empirical Management Conference (Harvard Business School), ACEGD (Indian Statistical Institute), Organizational Economics Summer Symposium (2024).
Funding: Stanford King Center on Global Development*; STEG Large Research Grant.
(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.
Presentations: Italian Economic Association Annual Conference* (2026); Stanford Remote Work Conference (2024).
Funding: European Research Council*.
(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.
Presentations: SED* (planned); Barcelona Summer Forum*, FAU/IAB Macro Labor Workshop* (2026); Hoover-SIEPR Conference on Remote Work, LUISS University (2025).
Tax, Lies and RedtapeTax 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.
Presentations: Delhi Macroeconomics Workshop, ISI Delhi (2017).
Funding: International Growth Centre; Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies.
(with Tanay Raj Bhatt & Sristi Sagar)
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.
Slides
What margins do firms use to comply with environmental regulation? While evidence from advanced economies suggests that market-based environmental regulation can reduce emissions without adverse real effects, I show that in a developing-country setting, firms respond by reducing scale rather than adopting new technology. Using a 26-year plant-level panel from India combined with newly digitized regulatory assignments, I study one of the largest energy efficiency programs implemented in a developing economy. The regulation reduced fuel expenditure by 9–18 percent. Firms contracted: employment fell by 5–8 percent, capital by 7 percent, and product scope declined. Physical efficiency rose through forced input reoptimization, but no technology was adopted: R&D, investment, and product upgrading were unchanged. The contraction is driven by physical capital constraints, not financial ones: old plants with non-retrofittable equipment contract most, while financial access does not help. These effects propagate through production networks to non-regulated plants in linked sectors. The findings have implications for the design of carbon markets in developing economies.
Presentations: Yale Firms, Trade, and Development Conference (planned); 8th EBRD–CEPR Research Symposium “The Frontiers of Finance in Emerging Markets” (2026).
Does Bankruptcy Reform Discipline Firms? Ex-Ante Effects of India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy CodeCan bankruptcy reform change firm behaviour even among firms that never enter bankruptcy? I study India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), enacted in 2016, which created a credible threat that defaulting promoters would lose control of their firms. Using a panel of 36,217 private Indian firms from the CMIE Prowess database over FY2010–2025, I find that firms with high pre-IBC leverage cut investment by 1.6 percentage points and improved return on assets by 3.6 percentage points relative to low-leverage firms after the reform. The baseline leverage coefficient is not significant due to mean reversion, but three independent corrections—firm-specific linear trends, first differences, and long differences—all recover significant deleveraging. Effects intensify after Section 29A barred defaulting promoters from rebidding (November 2017) and persist during the COVID suspension of IBC filings (FY2020–21), consistent with structural behavioural change. The findings suggest that the benefits of bankruptcy reform extend far beyond resolved cases.
When does institutional ownership change how firms operate? A one percentage point increase in foreign institutional ownership reduces firm energy intensity by 2.7 percent, but an identical increase in bank ownership has no effect. The difference is not ownership; it is the incentive to monitor. I exploit a setting where three types of institutional investors—foreign funds, domestic mutual funds, and banks—hold equity in the same Indian manufacturing firms under distinct regulatory mandates. A shift-share instrument identifies the causal effect of ownership; within-market variation in mandates identifies the role of incentives. Effects concentrate in margins subject to managerial discretion (energy, labor), not market-determined inputs (raw materials)—ruling out generic firm quality and supporting targeted monitoring. A direct test confirms the mechanism: when India’s securities regulator (SEBI) introduces ESG stewardship requirements in 2018, domestic mutual funds—which exhibited zero effect for a decade—become significant determinants of energy intensity, with flat pre-trends.
(with Mohd Shadab Danish)
Who controls the technologies that define global competitiveness? This study examines the effects of global value chain (GVC) positioning on the ownership of technological leadership. It proposes two patent-based measures, the Resident Most Important Technology Index (RMITI) and the Non-Resident Most Important Technology Index (NRMITI), of ownership of the globally dominant technological field. The study covers data on 55 economies for 1996–2022, estimating within-country fixed effects with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors. The outcome reveals a nonlinear and ownership-asymmetric pattern of GVC position on technological leadership. Backward integration follows a U-shaped path for resident ownership and an inverted-U for foreign ownership; however, forward integration follows the opposite pattern. Further, GVC participation aids access to knowledge, but whether that knowledge becomes resident-owned depends on the power structures governing the chain, domestic absorptive capacity, and how deeply a country is embedded in global production. Among technologically advanced economies, the costs of downward dependence and the benefits of upstream positioning are sharpest; developing economies depend more on absorptive capacity and upstream integration to build resident technological control. Thus, the findings show that technological sovereignty is not a fixed national attribute; rather it is earned or lost through a country’s structural position in global innovation networks.
(with Jon Hartley)
We study the effect of legal origin on firm-level outcomes using a unique natural experiment in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE mainland operates under civil law rooted in the French/Egyptian tradition, while two financial free zones—the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC, est. 2004) and the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM, est. 2015)—operate under English common law with independent courts and regulatory frameworks. Using firm-level data from Bureau van Dijk’s ORBIS database covering approximately 9,000 UAE firms, we compare firms incorporated under common law versus civil law within the same country, holding constant macroeconomic conditions, culture, and geography. We examine differences in firm size, capital structure, profitability, ownership concentration, and industry composition. Preliminary results suggest that common-law free zones attract disproportionately more financial and professional services firms, with differences in leverage and ownership structure consistent with the predictions of the legal origins literature.
In advanced economies, firms respond to rising import competition through innovation. In contrast, firms in developing countries face a large number of frictions and may not have the same levers to respond. I examine this question in the context of India, using detailed product-level data from CMIE Prowess and the China Shock instrumented with Chinese exports to third countries. I find that firms respond to import competition by closing down their lowest-value product lines: the 2SLS interaction of import penetration with lagged product sales is −0.385 (p<0.01). Import competition thus activates the “destruction” channel and reduces misallocation, but longer-run growth will require complementary innovation policy for the “creation” channel.
(with Claudia Nobile)
How do management practices shape product innovation? While a large literature shows that better-managed firms are more productive, we show that the channel runs through product selection, not experimentation. Using a novel survey of 2,371 Indian manufacturing firms linked to administrative product data and patent records, we find that better-managed firms maintain 24% larger product portfolios and derive 4–5 times more sales from genuinely new products than from imitation. In administrative data, creation rates are flat across management quartiles—but revenue per new product is 37% higher (p = 0.001). We rationalize these findings with a multi-product Jovanovic learning model where management is signal precision: better-managed firms screen product ideas more effectively before launch, selecting better rather than selecting more.
(with Michał Pilc & Beata Woźniak-Jęchorek)
Remote work could narrow gender and geographical disparities in labour market participation. Yet little is known about whether women in peripheral areas value it more than those in metropolitan ones. We argue that its value reflects a woman’s willingness to pay to ease the spatial constraints she faces: in peripheral municipalities, scarce local jobs and long commutes; in metropolitan areas, congestion or childcare costs. Beyond these material constraints, an identity channel may make remote work especially valuable where traditional gender norms hinder market work. We test these predictions with a conjoint experiment embedded in a Spring 2026 CAWI survey of 3,531 women aged 25–49 in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Sweden, who evaluated hypothetical job offers that varied in remote-work intensity. Fully remote work raises the probability of choosing an offer by about 14 percentage points relative to fully on-site work, yet average preferences do not differ significantly between metropolitan and peripheral municipalities—consistent with distinct constraints of comparable magnitude. Heterogeneity instead emerges within peripheral areas: women with above-basic digital skills, unstable household income, or traditional family attitudes prefer fully remote work more than metropolitan counterparts. That these gaps arise only for fully remote jobs supports the identity channel.
Presentations: IAB Colloquium, Institute for Employment Research* (2026).
The Local Footprint of Million Dollar Plants: Evidence from Three Decades of Satellite Data
(with Christos Makridis)
Mandatory Sustainability Disclosure and Firm Behavior: Evidence from India’s BRSR Reform
Funding: Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance.
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
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Measuring India’s Creative Economy
Esya Centre monograph, June 2020
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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