Measuring management practices

Good management practices are remarkably difficult to robustly measure, especially when unique data on firms and their managers are not available. We propose a new model estimated with Bayesian techniques that requires only the usual accounting data on inputs and outputs and thus can be applied to any firm. We show that our management practices estimates are more than 90% correlated with existing state-of-the-art measures from a very specialized data set by Bloom and Van Reenen (2007). We also obtain very high correlations when conducting an extensive Monte Carlo analysis. Finally, we show that frontier-based methods previously used to estimate management practices do not provide good approximations.