Nicholas Bloom
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3823060 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Nicholas Bloom |
| NOMBRES | Nicholas |
| APELLIDO | Bloom |
| FIRMA | BLOOM N |
| AFILIACIONES | Stanford University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 285 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2001 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Wonder city
The Impact of Covid-19 on Productivity
We analyze the impact of Covid-19 on productivity using data from an innovative monthly firm survey that asks for quantitative impacts of Covid-19 on inputs and outputs. We find that total factor productivity (TFP) fell by up to 6% during 2020–2021. The overall impact combined large reductions in ‘within-firm’ productivity, with offsetting positive ‘between-firm’ effects as less productive sectors, and less productive firms within them, contracte…
Do Well Managed Firms Make Better Forecasts
We link new forecast and management data on over 20,000 firms to data on productivity in manufacturing and services. The panel survey was administered in the UK in July 2017 and November 2020, coinciding with two periods of considerable uncertainty from Brexit and Covid. We find that better-managed firms make more accurate forecasts for firm-level turnover and macro-level GDP. Uniquely, we show better-managed firms are also aware that they make m…
Remote Work, Employee Mix, and Performance
Remote Work, Employee Mix, and Performance
Remote Work, Employee Mix, and Performance
Long Social Distancing
Many Americans continued some forms of social distancing after the pandemic. This phenomenon is stronger among older persons, less educated individuals, and those who interact daily with persons at high risk from infectious diseases. Regression models fit to individual-level data suggest that social distancing lowered labor force participation by 2.4 percentage points in 2022, 1.2 points on an earnings-weighted basis. When combined with simple eq…
The Finance Uncertainty Multiplier
We show how real and financial frictions amplify, prolong, and propagate the negative impact of uncertainty shocks. We use a novel instrumentation strategy to address endogeneity in estimating the impact of uncertainty by exploiting differential firm exposure to exchange rate, policy, and energy price volatility. We show that financially constrained firms cut investment more than unconstrained firms following an uncertainty shock. We then build a…
The Evolution of Work from Home
Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20-64 years old, as of mid-2023. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s. We first explain why the big shift to work from home has endured rather than reverting to prepandemic levels. We then consider how work-from-home rates vary by worker age, sex, education, parental status, industry and local population density, and why it is…
The World Uncertainty Index
Why Working from Home Will Stick
COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home (WFH). We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before. We develop evidence on five reasons for this large shift: better-than-expected WFH experiences, new investments in physical and human capital …
The Donut Effect of Covid-19 on Cities
Using data from the US Postal Service and Zillow, we quantify the effect of Covid-19 on migration patterns and real estate markets in US cities.We find three key results.First, within large US metro areas, households, businesses and real estate demand shift from central business districts (CBDs) to lower density suburbs and exurbs.We label this the "Donut Effect", reflecting the hollowing out of city centers and growth of suburban outer rings.Sec…
Trapped Factors and China’s Impact on Global Growth
After a recent increase in Chinese import competition, European firms increased innovation. We present and rationalise these patterns using ‘trapped factors’ at the micro level within a stylised equilibrium model of product-cycle trade and growth. Trade integration of the magnitude observed between the OECD and low-wage nations as a whole can considerably increase the long-run growth rate and welfare. In the short run exposed firms devote trapped…
The Unprecedented Stock Market Reaction to Covid-19
No previous infectious disease outbreak, including the Spanish Flu, has affected the stock market as forcefully as the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, previous pandemics left only mild traces on the U.S. stock market. We use text-based methods to develop these points with respect to large daily stock market moves back to 1900 and with respect to overall stock market volatility back to 1985. We also evaluate potential explanations for the unprecedente…
Covid-Induced Economic Uncertainty
Assessing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is essential for policymakers, but challenging because the crisis has unfolded with extreme speed. We identify three indicators -stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic uncertainty, and subjective uncertainty in business expectation surveys -that provide real-time forward-looking uncertainty measures. We use these indicators to document and quantify the enormous increase in economic…
The Unprecedented Stock Market Impact of Covid-19
Economic uncertainty before and during the Covid-19 pandemic
Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find
Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore's Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times lar…
A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation
Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to underprovide innovation because of the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the United States and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summarize the pros and cons of different policy instruments for promoting innovation and provide a basic "toolkit" describing which policies are most effective according to our reading of the evidence. In the short run, R&D…
Really Uncertain Business Cycles
We investigate the role of uncertainty in business cycles. First, we demonstrate that microeconomic uncertainty rises sharply during recessions, including during the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Second, we show that uncertainty shocks can generate drops in gross domestic product of around 2.5% in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. However, we also find that uncertainty shocks need to be supplemented by first…
Innovation, Reallocation, and Growth
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census microdata on firm-level output, R&D, and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output, and R&D. T…
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty
We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence—including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles—indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our U.S. index spikes near tight presidential elections, Gulf Wars I and II, the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the 2011 debt ceiling dispute, and other major battles ove…
Hospital Board And Management Practices Are Strongly Related To Hospital Performance On Clinical Quality Metrics
National policies to improve health care quality have largely focused on clinical provider outcomes and, more recently, payment reform. Yet the association between hospital leadership and quality, although crucial to driving quality improvement, has not been explored in depth. We collected data from surveys of nationally representative groups of hospitals in the United States and England to examine the relationships among hospital boards, managem…
Trade Induced Technical Change? The Impact of Chinese Imports on Innovation, IT and Productivity
We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change—patenting, IT, and TFP—using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish that the absolute volume of innovation increases within the firms most affected by Chinese imports in their output markets. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific quotas following China's entry into the World T…
Trade Induced Technical Change? The Impact of Chinese Imports on Innovation, IT and Productivity
We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change—patenting, IT, and TFP—using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish that the absolute volume of innovation increases within the firms most affected by Chinese imports in their output markets. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific quotas following China's entry into the World T…
Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries
Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. In this paper, we present evidence on a possible explanation for persistent differences in productivity at the firm and the national level-namely, that such differences largely reflect variations in management practices. We have, over the last decade, undertaken a large survey research program to systematically measure management practices ac…
Does Management Matter in schools
Journal Article Does Management Matter in schools? Get access Nicholas Bloom, Nicholas Bloom Stanford University, Centre for Economic Performance, CEPR and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Renata Lemos, Renata Lemos Cambridge University and Centre for Economic Performance Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Raffaella Sadun, Raffaella Sadun Harvard University, Centre…
Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find
Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore's Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times lar…
Fluctuations in Uncertainty
Uncertainty is an amorphous concept. It reflects uncertainty in the minds of consumers, managers, and policymakers about possible futures. It is also a broad concept, including uncertainty over the path of macro phenomena like GDP growth, micro phenomena like the growth rate of firms, and noneconomic events like war and climate change. In this essay, I address four questions about uncertainty. First, what are some facts and patterns about economi…
The Evolution of Work from Home
Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20-64 years old, as of mid-2023. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s. We first explain why the big shift to work from home has endured rather than reverting to prepandemic levels. We then consider how work-from-home rates vary by worker age, sex, education, parental status, industry and local population density, and why it is…
A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation
Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to underprovide innovation because of the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the United States and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summarize the pros and cons of different policy instruments for promoting innovation and provide a basic "toolkit" describing which policies are most effective according to our reading of the evidence. In the short run, R&D…
Patents, Real Options and Firm Performance
that patents have an economically and statistically significant impact on firm-level productivity and market value. While patenting feeds into market values immediately it appears to have a slower effect on productivity. This generates valuable real options because patents provide exclusive rights to develop new innovations, enabling firms to delay investments. Higher market uncertainty, which increases the value of real options, reduces the impa…
Modern Management
We use an innovative methodology to measure management practices in over 300 manufacturing firms in the UK. We then match this management data to production and energy usage information for establishments owned by these firms. We find that establishments in better managed firms are significantly less energy intensive. This effect is quantitatively substantial: going from the 25th to the 75th percentile of management practices is associated with a…
The Finance Uncertainty Multiplier
We show how real and financial frictions amplify, prolong, and propagate the negative impact of uncertainty shocks. We use a novel instrumentation strategy to address endogeneity in estimating the impact of uncertainty by exploiting differential firm exposure to exchange rate, policy, and energy price volatility. We show that financially constrained firms cut investment more than unconstrained firms following an uncertainty shock. We then build a…
Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
The Federal Icarus
Patents, Real Options and Firm Performance
that patents have an economically and statistically significant impact on firm-level productivity and market value. While patenting feeds into market values immediately it appears to have a slower effect on productivity. This generates valuable real options because patents provide exclusive rights to develop new innovations, enabling firms to delay investments. Higher market uncertainty, which increases the value of real options, reduces the impa…
Competition and Innovation
Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
Modern Management
We use an innovative methodology to measure management practices in over 300 manufacturing firms in the UK. We then match this management data to production and energy usage information for establishments owned by these firms. We find that establishments in better managed firms are significantly less energy intensive. This effect is quantitatively substantial: going from the 25th to the 75th percentile of management practices is associated with a…
Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries
Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. In this paper, we present evidence on a possible explanation for persistent differences in productivity at the firm and the national level-namely, that such differences largely reflect variations in management practices. We have, over the last decade, undertaken a large survey research program to systematically measure management practices ac…
Americans Do IT Better
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, e…
The Organization of Firms Across 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 headquartered in high-trust regions are significantly more likely to decentralize. To…
Does Management Matter? Evidence from India
A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investigate this, we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on management practices to randomly chosen treatment plants and compared their performance to a set of control plants. We fin…
Spatial Regulation in New York City/The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn
Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment
A rising share of employees now regularly engage in working from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned either to work from home or in the office for nine months. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working…
Trapped Factors and China's Impact on Global Growth
After a recent increase in Chinese import competition, European firms increased innovation. We present and rationalise these patterns using ‘trapped factors’ at the micro level within a stylised equilibrium model of product-cycle trade and growth. Trade integration of the magnitude observed between the OECD and low-wage nations as a whole can considerably increase the long-run growth rate and welfare. In the short run exposed firms devote trapped…
Fluctuations in Uncertainty
Uncertainty is an amorphous concept. It reflects uncertainty in the minds of consumers, managers, and policymakers about possible futures. It is also a broad concept, including uncertainty over the path of macro phenomena like GDP growth, micro phenomena like the growth rate of firms, and noneconomic events like war and climate change. In this essay, I address four questions about uncertainty. First, what are some facts and patterns about economi…
Hospital Board And Management Practices Are Strongly Related To Hospital Performance On Clinical Quality Metrics
National policies to improve health care quality have largely focused on clinical provider outcomes and, more recently, payment reform. Yet the association between hospital leadership and quality, although crucial to driving quality improvement, has not been explored in depth. We collected data from surveys of nationally representative groups of hospitals in the United States and England to examine the relationships among hospital boards, managem…
Trade Induced Technical Change? The Impact of Chinese Imports on Innovation, IT and Productivity
We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change—patenting, IT, and TFP—using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish that the absolute volume of innovation increases within the firms most affected by Chinese imports in their output markets. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific quotas following China's entry into the World T…
Does Management Matter in schools
Journal Article Does Management Matter in schools? Get access Nicholas Bloom, Nicholas Bloom Stanford University, Centre for Economic Performance, CEPR and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Renata Lemos, Renata Lemos Cambridge University and Centre for Economic Performance Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Raffaella Sadun, Raffaella Sadun Harvard University, Centre…
Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty
We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence—including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles—indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our U.S. index spikes near tight presidential elections, Gulf Wars I and II, the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the 2011 debt ceiling dispute, and other major battles ove…
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
Really Uncertain Business Cycles
We investigate the role of uncertainty in business cycles. First, we demonstrate that microeconomic uncertainty rises sharply during recessions, including during the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Second, we show that uncertainty shocks can generate drops in gross domestic product of around 2.5% in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. However, we also find that uncertainty shocks need to be supplemented by first…
Innovation, Reallocation, and Growth
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census microdata on firm-level output, R&D, and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output, and R&D. T…
A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation
Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to underprovide innovation because of the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the United States and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summarize the pros and cons of different policy instruments for promoting innovation and provide a basic "toolkit" describing which policies are most effective according to our reading of the evidence. In the short run, R&D…
The Unprecedented Stock Market Reaction to Covid-19
No previous infectious disease outbreak, including the Spanish Flu, has affected the stock market as forcefully as the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, previous pandemics left only mild traces on the U.S. stock market. We use text-based methods to develop these points with respect to large daily stock market moves back to 1900 and with respect to overall stock market volatility back to 1985. We also evaluate potential explanations for the unprecedente…
Covid-Induced Economic Uncertainty
Assessing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is essential for policymakers, but challenging because the crisis has unfolded with extreme speed. We identify three indicators -stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic uncertainty, and subjective uncertainty in business expectation surveys -that provide real-time forward-looking uncertainty measures. We use these indicators to document and quantify the enormous increase in economic…
The Unprecedented Stock Market Impact of Covid-19
Economic uncertainty before and during the Covid-19 pandemic
Economics (24 obras) · Business (17 obras) · Economic Growth and Productivity (10 obras) · Productivity (10 obras) · Economic growth (8 obras) · Firm Innovation and Growth (8 obras) · Market economy (8 obras) · COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts (7 obras) · Geography (7 obras) · Labour economics (7 obras)