The Impact of CEOs in the Public Sector: Evidence from the English NHS
We investigate whether top managers affect the performance of large public sector organizations. As our case study we examine CEOs of English public hospitals, which are large, complex organizations with multi-million turnover. We study the impact of individual CEOs on a wide set of measures of hospital performance, intermediate operational outcomes and inputs. We adopt two econometric approaches: a parametric approach that exploits the movement of CEOs across different hospitals and a non-parametric difference-in-difference matching estimator. Overall, we find little evidence that individual CEOs have an impact on a large set of measures of hospital performance. This result is not due to the allocation of good performers to poorly performing hospitals.
Keywords: Management; Performance; Public Sector; Measurement and Metrics; Health Industry;
Citation:
Janke, Katharina, Carol Propper, and Raffaella Sadun. "The Impact of CEOs in the Public Sector: Evidence from the English NHS." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-075, March 2018. View Details