Nick Bloom
Nick Bloom is a Professor in the department of economics and Professor, by courtesy, at the Graduate School of Business. He is also the Co-Director of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a fellow of the Centre for Economic Performance, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.Nick was an undergraduate in Cambridge, a masters student at Oxford, and a PhD student at University College London. While completing his PhD he worked part-time at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a London based tax think-tank. After completing his PhD Nick worked as a business tax policy advisor to the UK Treasury, and then joined McKinsey & Company as a management consultant. In 2003 he moved to the London School of Economics to focus on research, before joining Stanford University in 2005.Professor Bloom’s research focuses on measuring and explaining management practices. He has been working with McKinsey & Company as part of a long-run effort to collect management data from over 10,000 firms across industries and countries. The aim is to build an empirical basis for understanding what factors drive differences in management practices across regions, industries and countries, and how this determines firm and national performance. More recently he has also been working with Accenture on running management experiments. He also works on understanding the impacts of large uncertainty shocks–such as the credit crunch, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Cuban Missile crisis–on the US economy, for which he won the Frisch Medal in 2010.Nick lives on Stanford campus with his wife and three children. As a born and bred Londoner, married to a Scottish wife, with kids attending US schools, he lives in a multi-lingual English household.
Content by Nick Bloom
-
Data Item
Data: Management practices in retail, education and healthcare sectors in India
This paper presents the first in-depth descriptive look at the state of management practices in India. Using a unique dataset measuring the quality of management practices across countries and sectors, we find a consistent pattern of poor management practices in India in comparison to higher income countries across all the sectors studied: manufacturing, retail, education...
1 Mar 2019
-
Data Item
Data: Multinationals and growth in developing countries
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local plant managers in almost 4,000 firms in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We find that firms...
28 Feb 2019
-
Publication - Working Paper
Managing trade: Evidence from China and the US
11 Jun 2018 | Nick Bloom, Kalina Manova, John Van Reenen, Zhihong Yu
-
Multimedia Item - Video
Nick Bloom: Do management interventions last?
How does improving management practices improve firm performance? Nick Bloom shares research results from India, which show that introducing management practices to textile firms had lasting impact several years on.
18 May 2018
-
Publications Reader Item
Management delivers: Why firms should invest in better business practices
25 Apr 2018
-
Publication - Growth Brief
Management delivers: Why firms should invest in better business practices
There is a stark difference in firm productivity and growth between developing and advanced economies. Improving the management of firms in developing countries can help bridge this gap. New research shows that introducing management practices to firms can have lasting impacts on their productivity and growth. When Indian firms adopted management practices, their...
28 Mar 2018 | Nick Bloom, Leonie Dressel, Emilie Yam
-
Publication - Project Memo
Management in Pakistan: Evidence from Sindh, Khyber-Paktunkhawa, and Baluchistan
2 Mar 2018 | John Van Reenen, Ali Choudhary, Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos
-
Publication - Working Paper
Management in Pakistan: First evidence from Punjab
8 Apr 2016 | Renata Lemos, John Van Reenen, Nick Bloom, Ali Choudhary
-
Publication - Project Memo
Management practices in the manufacturing sector in Mozambique (Project Memo)
9 Feb 2016 | Renata Lemos, Nick Bloom, John Van Reenen
-
Project
Management practices in retail, education, and healthcare sectors in India
Researchers used an interview-based evaluation tool that defines and scores basic management practices. Middle-income countries have much worse management practices than firms in high-income countries, which appears to be due to a large tail of badly managed firms coexisting with firms with world-class management practices. India’s average management...
10 Oct 2014 | Daniela Scur, Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos
-
Project
Management practices in the manufacturing sector in Mozambique
Poor management practices hamper the ability to innovate and react to new challenges and opportunities Mozambican firms are ranked last in terms of management practices The researchers used an interview-based evaluation to assess management quality of 108 Mozambican manufacturing firms IPEME, the national institute for Small and Medium Enterprises...
4 Sep 2014 | John Van Reenen, Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos
-
Project
Multinationals and growth in developing countries
Recent work has highlighted the incredible dispersion of productivity in developing countries and how this contributes to their lower aggregate productivity levels. Low productivity in developing countries leads to lower wages and ultimately much lower consumption. Why is there such a large spread of productivity and what policies can address this? One strand of the...
4 Sep 2014 | Philippe Aghion, Nick Bloom, John Van Reenen
-
Publication - Evidence Paper
IGC Evidence Paper - Firms
The IGC Firm Capabilities Research Programme pulls economists with a common interest in firm capabilities together to focus on three core questions: (i) what are the key proximate determinants of firm productivity? (ii) Where does the productive capacity of firms originate? (iii) What are the barriers that prevent resources from moving from unproductive firms and...
2 Sep 2014 | Nick Bloom, Greg Fischer, Imran Rasul, Andrés Rodríguez-Clare, Tavneet Suri, Chris Udry, Eric Verhoogen, Christopher Woodruff, Giulia Zane
-
Project
Management practices in the manufacturing sector in Pakistan
Looking across almost 2,000 firms, researchers find very wide variation in management practices across firms (and areas) within Punjab. Pakistan plants have lower average management scores than the US and a higher level of dispersion, suggesting that weakly managed firms exit more slowly in Pakistan. Establishments with higher management scores are...
1 May 2014 | Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos, John Van Reenen, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur
-
Publication - Working Paper
Could poor management be holding back development? (Working Paper)
1 Nov 2012 | Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos, Daniela Scur
-
Publication - Policy Brief
Are poor management practices holding back middle-income countries? (Policy Brief)
1 Nov 2012 | Nick Bloom, Renata Lemos, Daniela Scur
-
Publication - Working Paper
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
1 Mar 2012 | Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen
-
Publication - Working Paper
The Organization of Firms Across Countries (Working Paper)
22 Jan 2012 | Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen
-
Publication - Policy Brief
The Organization of Firms Across Countries (Policy Brief)
1 Jan 2012 | Philippe Aghion, Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen
-
Publication - Policy Brief
Does management matter? Evidence from India (Policy Brief)
1 Jan 2011 | Nick Bloom
-
Publication - Working Paper
Does management matter? Evidence from India (Working Paper)
1 Dec 2010 | Nick Bloom, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie, John Roberts
-
Project
Making good management stick: Evidence from India
A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen set of treatment plants and compared their performance to the control plants....
1 Mar 2010 | Nick Bloom, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie, John Roberts
-
Project
How firms differ between countries and how organisations are evolving over time
Firm capabilities are crucial to economic development in poor nations, and therefore understanding how firms differ and how they evolve is a crucial component for any robust theory of growth. For instance, why do firms in developing countries struggle to grow and increase productivity, even though the hard and soft technologies are available? Cross country information on...
1 Sep 2009 | John Van Reenen, Nick Bloom