Education and management practices

Abstract

The empirical management literature has found that the education of both managers and the workforce more generally appears to be an important driver of better management practices. This article sets out how such relationships might be conceptualized, and suggests that in a complementarities framework, modern management practices can be thought of as a type of skill-biased technology. It then summarizes the literature that has explored the relationships between human capital and surveyed management practices in manufacturing firms and other sectors, highlighting the handful of papers that have found a positive correlation between management practices and measures of local skills supply. It concludes with a discussion of the policy implications that stem from what we know so far, together with avenues for future research that could shed more light on the causal mechanisms at play.