Some of the key determinants of productivity, economic growth, innovation, and income inequality are the management practices of firms. Unfortunately, in contrast to labor, capital and resource inputs, consistent and comprehensive data do not exist on management and organizational practices. This project collaborates with the Census Bureau to survey establishments about the nature and extent of these practices.
Intellectual Merit: This is the first large-scale cross-sector panel dataset that can be matched by the US research community to numerous existing datasets on productivity, innovation, employment, technology, energy and indicators of worker well-being (such as health) within the Census Research Data Centers.
Because of the importance of the topic, the Census Bureau believes this can be added as a repeated supplement to the Annual Survey of Manufacturing (ASM) in order to construct a panel of data on about 45,000 establishments. This survey is initially targeted at manufacturing because of the availability of a range of other manufacturing data and the relative ease of measuring productivity, but the plan is to rapidly extend this to other sectors, in particular retail and health care to build on our existing firm-level management surveys in these areas.
The project uses these data to address a number of important research, policy and managerial questions. For example:
- What is the relationship between management, organization, productivity and growth, and what policies can promote these practices to support the growth of US firms?
- What are the extent of regional, industrial and firm-size variations in management and organizational practices;
- What are the dynamics of organizational practices over time and firms?
- What types of management practices are associated with changes in inequality over time?
Broader Impacts: These questions are central to US policy-makers who seek to promote the success of US firms, and to make decisions based on a sound understanding of the economy. The data analysis should yield important academic and policy results.
