Managerial Talent and Managerial Practices: Are They Complements?

We examine the role of managerial talent and its interaction with practices in determining firm performance. build a matched firm-director panel dataset for universe limited liability companies Italy, tracking individuals across different firms over time. define as management's capacity to boost firms' total factor productivity, estimated using two-way fixed effects model. Combining data survey information on representative sample firms, we then document that our measure correlates ex-ante ex-post indicators ability, i.e. managers' educational attainment their forecast precision respect firm's future Most important, leverage adoption within potential synergies between structured practices, thus bridging two separate strands literature. While do productivity own, there is evidence complementarities two. These findings hold both cross-sectional setting analysis accounts time-invariant heterogeneity. Overall, results indicate effectiveness depends ability implement them.