Person:

Sadun, Raffaella

Using an innovative survey measure of management practices on over 15,000 firms, we find private equity firms are better managed than government, family, and privately owned firms, and have similar management to publicly listed firms. This is true both in developed and developing countries. Looking at management practices in detail we find that private equity owned firms have strong people management practices (hiring, firing, pay, and promotions), but even stronger monitoring management practices (lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, and monitoring). Plant managers working in private equity owned firms also report greater autonomy from headquarters over sales, marketing, and new product introduction.

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the U.S. obtain the highest management scores closely followed by Germany, with a gap to Italy, Brazil and then finally India. We also show that autonomous government schools (i.e. government funded but with substantial independence like UK academies and U.S.charters) have significantly higher management scores than regular government schools and private schools. Almost half of the difference between the management scores of autonomous government schools and regular government schools is accounted for by differences in leadership of the principal and better governance.