Name: Management Practices and Productivity: Evidence from Germany, Japan and the UK
Start: 2019-06-19T01:06
End: 2019-06-19T01:06

Venue: National Institute of Economics and Social Research (NIESR), 2 Dean Trench Street, London, SW1P 3HE

Low productivity is one of the most important challenges that the UK economy faces and thus raising productivity is core to the UK’s Industrial Strategy. The UK has a longstanding productivity gap with other developed countries such as the United States and Germany. The workshop will cover recent analysis of managerial capabilities and productivity from large-scale survey projects in Germany, Japan and the UK. We will discuss findings and policy implications and explore methodologies allowing us to conduct international comparison to better understand management practices at the business-level and their implications for the aggregate economy.

This ESCoE workshop was by invitation only and was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) ES/S012729/1 and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.

Presentation Slides

Partners

Agenda

13:00 Registration

13:30 Introduction by Rebecca Riley (NIESR, ESCoE)

13:40 Presentation 1: Overview of Japanese MOPS Project by Atsushi Ohyama (Hitotsubashi University)

The first wave of the Japanese Managerial and Organizational Practices Survey (JP-MOPS) was conducted in January 2017 as Japanese official statistics, and it closely followed the survey design and questions of the 2015 US-MOPS. As past studies have documented, the data from JP-MOPS show that management scores vary substantially across establishments and that management scores are positively associated with establishment/firm performance such as productivity, profitability and innovation. JP-MOPS can be linked with other data sources and help to advance our understanding of the roles of management practices in productivity, human resource management, transaction networks and country-specific contexts.

14:25 Presentation 2: The German Management and Organizational Practices Survey (GMOP) by Marie-Christine Laible (The Institute for Employment Research, IAB)

Observing persistent productivity differences between firms and nations, a strand of research focuses on the explanatory power of management practices. The German Management and Organizational Practices Survey (GMOP) is the first large-scale survey that allows a systematic investigation of management practices in Germany and their impact on firm performance. I present the questionnaire, sample design and the representativity of the data. Then, I analyze the heterogeneous dispersion of management practices and reveal a robustly positive association between management practices and productivity. Finally, as the GMOP is based on a US survey, I can compare my results with those from the US and discuss aspects of international comparative work.

15:10 Tea Break

15:30 Presentation 3: Management practices and productivity in UK production and services industries by Wil Roberts (Office for National Statistics)

The Management and Expectation Survey (MES) collected data on UK firms in 2016. In this talk, we focus on the prevalence of structured management practices across a range of categories including firm size, industry, age and ownership types, including multinational and family ownership.

Our research found varied incidence of structured management practices at the firm level. We found more structured practices among larger, foreign-owned and non-family-owned firms than among smaller, domestically-owned and family-owned businesses. Our analysis shows strong positive correlation between management practices and productivity. We will also look ahead towards future analysis and plans for the survey.

16:15 Discussion

Chair: Tatsuro Senga (Queen Mary, University of London, ESCoE)

16:30 Close