Researchers can now measure what makes one company's culture better than another — using AI to read a million employee reviews

Economists built a measurement tool that extracts organizational quality from employee reviews on Glassdoor, using AI to find patterns across a million worker accounts. This means researchers can now quantify something that was previously invisible: whether a company's internal culture and management actually predict how well it performs financially, and whether that quality persists or shifts over time.

For decades, economists have argued that differences in organizational quality explain why similar companies produce wildly different results. But measuring it required surveys, interviews, or guesswork — methods too slow and expensive to track across thousands of firms over years. This tool lets researchers actually test whether management practices, workplace culture, and internal coordination are real predictors of firm performance, not just intuition. The data exists. The measurement method now exists. What changes is: people trying to understand why companies succeed or fail can now point to measurable organizational factors instead of hand-waving about execution.