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.

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals closer to universities offering both medical education and business education have lower mortality rates from acute myocardial infarction (heart attacks), better management practices, and more MBA-trained managers. This is true compared to the distance to universities that offer only business or medical education (or neither). We argue that supplying bundled medical and business education may be a channel through which universities improve management practices in hospitals and raise clinical performance.

We test the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) polarize labor markets by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated workers. Using data on the United States, Japan, and nine European countries from 1980 to 2004, we find that industries with faster ICT growth shifted demand from middle-educated workers to highly educated workers, consistent with ICT-based polarization. Trade openness is also associated with polarization, but this is not robust to controlling for R&D. Technologies account for up to a quarter of the growth in demand for highly educated workers.

Many writers have claimed that research and development (R&D) has two faces. In addition to the conventional role of stimulating innovation, R&D enhances technology transfer (absorptive capacity). We explore this idea empirically using a panel of industries across twelve OECD countries. We find R&D to be statistically and economically important in both technological catch-up and innovation. Human capital also plays an major role in productivity growth, but we only find a small effect of trade. In failing to take account of R&D-based absorptive capacity, existing U.S.-based studies may underestimate the return to R&D.