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.

US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in Europe also experienced a “productivity miracle.” US multinationals obtained higher productivity from IT than non-US multinationals, particularly in the same sectors responsible for the US productivity acceleration. Furthermore, establishments taken over by US multinationals (but not by non-US multinationals) increased the productivity of their IT. Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher “people management” practices.

Despite the continuing U.S. hospital merger wave, it remains unclear how mergers change, or fail to change, hospital behavior and performance. We open the black box of hospital practices through a megamerger between two for-profit chains. Benchmarking the merger's effects against the acquirer's stated aims, we show they achieved some of their goals, harmonizing electronic medical records and sending managers to target hospitals. Postacquisition managerial processes were similar across the merged chain. However, these interventions failed to drive detectable gains in performance. Our findings demonstrate the importance of organizations for merger research in health care and the economy more generally.