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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.

Abstract
This article investigates the link between management practices and workforce skills in manufacturing firms, exploiting geographical variation in the supply of human capital. Skills measures are constructed using newly compiled data on universities and regional labour markets across 19 countries. Consistent with management practices being complementary with skills, we show that firms further away from universities employ fewer skilled workers and are worse managed, even after controlling for a rich set of observables and fixed effects. Analysis using regional skill premia suggests that variation in the price of skill drives these relationships.

AbstractFurther education and sixth form colleges are key institutions for facilitating skill acquisition among 16–19 year olds in the UK. They enrol half a school cohort after completion of their lower secondary education, and this includes a disproportionate number from low‐income backgrounds. Yet little is known about what could improve performance in these institutions. We conduct the world's first management practices survey in such institutions, and match this to administrative longitudinal data on over 40,000 students. Value‐added regressions with rich controls suggest that structured management matters for educational outcomes, especially for students from low‐income backgrounds. For this group, in a hypothetical scenario where an individual is moved from a college at the 10th percentile of management practices to the 90th, this would be associated with 8% higher probability of achieving a good high school qualification, nearly half of the educational gap between those from poor and non‐poor backgrounds. Hence improving management practices may be an important channel for reducing inequalities.