管理与企业活力（英）

Management and Firm DynamismNicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley,Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh, and John Van ReenenFederal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no.1157July2025https://doi.org/10.59576/sr.1157AbstractWe show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals,openings,andclosingsin U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managedplantsand improvethe performance of the plants they acquire. To explain these findings,we build a model with two keyelements. First, management is a combination of firm-levelmanagementability(e.g. CEO quality), whichcan be transferred to all plants, and plant-levelmanagementpractices, which can be changed throughintangible investment (e.g. consulting ortraining). Second, management both raises productivity and alsoreduces the operational costsof dynamism: buying, selling, opening,and closing plants. We structurallyestimate the model onCensus microdata, fitting our key dynamic moments, and then use it to establishthree additionalresults. First, mergers and acquisitions raise economy-wide management and productivitybyreallocating plants to firms with higher management ability. Banning M&A would depressGDP andmanagement by about 15percent. Second, greater product market competition improvesbothmanagement and productivity by reallocating away from badly managed plants. Finally,managementpractices account for about a fifth of the cross-country productivity differenceswith the U.S.JEL classification:L2, M2, O32, O33Keywords:management practices, mergers and acquisitions, productivity, competitionSchuh: Federal Reserve Bank of New York (email:rachel.schuh@ny.frb.org).Bloom, Hartley:StanfordUniversity(emails:nbloom@stanford.edu,hartleyj@stanford.edu).Sadun: HarvardBusiness School(email:rsadun@hbs.edu).Van Reenen: LSE and MIT (email:j.vanreenen@lse.ac.uk).This papersubsumesaprevious paper titled “Management as a Technology?” (Bloom et al, 2017). The authorswould like to thank participants in numerous seminars and the Economic and Social ResearchCouncil,UKRI through POID, the Kauffman Foundation, PEDL,and the Alfred Sloan Foundation for financialsupport. Theythank Renata Lemos and Daniela Scur for ongoing discussions and feedback on the paper.The Census Bureau’s DisclosureReview Board and Disclosure Avoidance Officers have reviewed thisinformation product for unauthorized disclosureof confidential information and have approved thedisclosure avoidance practices applied to this release. This researchwas performed at a Federal StatisticalResearch Data Center under FSRDC Project Number 1694 (CBDRB-FY22-P1694-R9664).This paper presents preliminary findings and is being distributed to economists and other interestedreaders solely to stimulate discussion and elicit comments. The views expressed in this paper are those ofthe author(s) and do not necessarily reflect theposition of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,theFederal Reserve System, or theU.S. Census Bureau. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of theauthor(s).To view the authors’ disclosure statements, visithttps://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr1157.html. 1IntroductionThe existing literature has shown the important role that management plays in driving productivityin firms, using both cross-sectional and panel data.1the mechanism through which management affects within-firm changes in productivity.In thispaper, we focus on a specific aspect of this question, i.e., whether and how management affectsfirm dynamism around entry, exit, acquisitions, and divestitures.Exploring this mechanism isimportant because such reallocation has been identified as a key margin of productivity growth.To investigate whether and how management influences within-firm reallocation we draw on twodatabases. First, we examine the U.S. Census Bureau Management and Organizational PracticesSurvey (MOPS), which has management data for approximately 60,000 US plants in 2010, 2015,and 2021.Importantly, this plant-level management data can be matched to firm ownership in-formation in the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), which allows us to examine plant-levelacquisitions and disposals alongside plant-level openings and closings.Second, we examine theWorld Management Survey (WMS), providing original survey data on management practices forover 11,000 firms in 34 countries. Besides its rich cross-sectional nature, both in terms of countriesand industries covered, this dataset also features a significant panel component built through sixdifferent survey waves from 2004 to 2021.We start by analyzing the U.S. Census micro-data to examine the relationship between managementand different margins of firm expansion and contraction.We document four key facts.First,better-managed firms more frequently purchase and open new plants.Second, better-managedfirms also more frequently sell and close existing plants. Since the relationship of management withexpansion is stronger than the relatio