A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm … performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting … on modern management practices to a randomly chosen set of treatment plants and compared their performance to the control …

Beginning in 2008, we ran a randomized controlled trial that changed management practices in a set of Indian weaving … management practices adopted in the original experimental plants had been dropped, there was still a large and significant gap in … control plants, suggesting lasting impacts of effective management interventions. Second, while few management practices had …