Managing to Adapt: Structured Management Practices and Firm Resilience
Dr. Adele Wei LI, Research Assistant Professor, University of Macau
Date: 25 September 2023 (Monday)
Time: 12:30pm -2:00 pm
Venue: E22 FBA Lobby
Abstract
Why do some firms adapt and even thrive when major unexpected shocks occur? Using novel data from the Management and Expectations Survey (MES), we investigate the activities of UK firms in response to the natural experiment of the pandemic, which suddenly and unexpectedly separated workers and customers from their normal work and retail spaces. We find that firms with more structured management practices were more resilient, adopting homeworking and online sales practices more fully, and suffering a smaller decline in turnover when exposed to the same shock. We then link the MES to the high-frequency Business Insights and Conditions Survey (BICS) and find that firms with more structured management practices innovated in multiple ways to support this change in their operating model, through adopting new products, improving products and services, their logistics and distribution. We investigate the dynamics of homeworking adoption, and find that the adoption gap opened up fairly early on, and persisted throughout. After the pandemic, firms with more structured management practices were more likely to settle into a hybrid working pattern, expected to continue innovating at a higher pace compared to their pre-pandemic expectations and expected their pandemic innovations to raise their productivity into the future.
Speaker
Wei (Adele) Li received her PhD from Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her PhD dissertations have been published as a Book titled Competition in the Retail Market of Consumer Packaged Goods, in which advanced quantitative methods are used to study large datasets from supermarkets. After her PhD, she worked as a postdoc researcher at University of Nottingham, collaborating with Office for National Statistics (ONS) on firms management practices and productivity. Her expertise lies in using quantitative methods (panel data model, lasso, elastic net, random forest, etc.) to study market responses.
All are welcome!
