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Journal article

Trade and management


—We study how management practices shape export performance using matched production-trade-management data for Chinese and American firms and a randomized control trial in India. Better-managed firms are more likely to export, sell more products to more destinations, and earn higher export revenues and profits. They export higher-quality products at higher prices and lower quality-adjusted prices. They import a wider range of inputs and inputs of higher quality and price, from more advanced countries. We rationalize these patterns with a heterogeneous-firm model in which effective management improves performance by raising production efficiency and quality capacity. © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Nicholas Bloom, Kalina Manova, Stephen Teng Sun, John Van Reenen and Zhihong Yu

1 May 2021


The Review of Economics and Statistics 103(3) , pp.443-460, 2021


DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00925

https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/103/3/443/97684/Trade-and-Management

This work is published under POID and the CEP's Growth programme.