IT and Management in America

John van Reenen, Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Itay Saporta-Eksten, Lucia Foster, Megha Patnaik and Ron Jarmin
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Itay Saporta Eksten

No 9886, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: The Census Bureau recently conducted a survey of management practices in over 30,000 plants across the US, the first large-scale survey of management in America. Analyzing these data reveals several striking results. First, more structured management practices are tightly linked to higher levels of IT intensity in terms of a higher expenditure on IT and more on-line sales. Likewise, more structured management is strongly linked with superior performance: establishments adopting more structured practices for performance monitoring, target setting and incentives enjoy greater productivity and profitability, higher rates of innovation and faster employment growth. Second, there is a substantial dispersion of management practices across the establishments. We find that 18% of establishments have adopted at least 75% of these more structured management practices, while 27% of establishments adopted less than 50% of these. Third, more structured management practices are more likely to be found in establishments that export, who are larger (or are part of bigger firms), and have more educated employees. Establishments in the South and Midwest have more structured practices on average than those in the Northeast and West. Finally, we find adoption of structured management practices has increased between 2005 and 2010 for surviving establishments, particularly for those practices involving data collection and analysis.

Keywords: It; Management; Organization; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-ict and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Working Paper: IT and Management in America (2014)
Working Paper: IT and management in America (2014)
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