The Financial Impact of ISO 9000 Certification in the United States: An Empirical Analysis

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain or increase their market share, or both. Others argue that the standard is too generic to cause performance improvement but can be seen as a signal of good management. In this paper, we track financial performance from 1987 to 1997 of all publicly traded ISO 9000 certified manufacturing firms in the United States with SIC codes 2000–3999, and test whether ISO 9000 certification leads to productivity improvements, market…

• UO
  University of Pennsylvania
• UO
  University of Minnesota
• UO
  University of California, Santa Barbara
• AS
  Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles