(Correspondent Tang Li) On June 25 of 2018, Professor Hong Cheng and his coauthors’ paper titled “Do CEO Knows Best? Evidence from China” was published in full text on the top of the column “New This Week” on the website of National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a U.S. authority in economic research.
This paper is an empirical study based on the valuable, first-hand data collected from China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES). Based on the CEES three-year follow-up investigation on 1,208 firms and 11,366 employees in China, the research team collected the world’s first management data from the perspectives of firms and employees. They analyzed the scores and views of the CEOs, senior management and workers on their firm’s management capabilities, and found that the CEOs know best of firm performance, compared with the senior managers and the workers, and the CEO’s management scores are the most predictive of a firm’s performance, production and innovation. They also concluded that enhancing the consistency in management across the levels in a firm is an effective way to improve firm performance and innovation capabilities. The paper was reproduced by the Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation forum of the Law School, Harvard University at the same day of its online publication on NBER, and then drew great attention from the academics.
NBER Working Papers: http://www.nber.org/papers/w24760
