Nicholas Bloom

Nicholas Bloom is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and co-director of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research spans management practices, uncertainty, and working arrangements.

Research and contribution

Bloom and John Van Reenen developed survey measures of management practices for firms in the United States and Europe. Their study found that stronger measured practices were associated with higher productivity and other firm outcomes. Because that comparison is observational, the association alone does not show that changing a firm’s practices will cause its performance to improve.

Bloom and coauthors later tested that question in a randomized field experiment at Indian textile firms. Plants offered consulting adopted management practices that the researchers reported raised productivity by 17% in the first year. The experiment provides evidence that comparatively transferable operational improvements can matter substantially in that setting; it does not establish that the firms gained an enduring competitive advantage.

His work on working arrangements also tests performance claims against measured outcomes. In a randomized experiment with volunteers from a Chinese travel company’s call center, Bloom and coauthors found that working from home increased performance by 13%, while promotion rates conditional on performance fell. In a separate trial involving 1,612 employees at Trip.com, Bloom, Ruobing Han, and James Liang found that an option to work from home two days a week reduced quit rates by about one-third, with no detected damage to the performance measures they studied. The jobs and arrangements differed, so neither result is a universal estimate of remote work’s effects.

Relevance to OutcomesLab

Bloom’s research offers an empirical check on claims about strategy and execution. The textile-plant experiment shows that firms can achieve substantial gains by adopting management practices without first demonstrating a distinctive activity system. Whether such gains persist or create a position rivals cannot match remains a separate strategic question. This distinction is OutcomesLab’s interpretation of the evidence, not a conclusion tested by that experiment.