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 …

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year …-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational … outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obtain the highest management scores closely followed by Germany, with a gap to …

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 …

This paper uses new data to study school management and productivity in India. We report four main results. First …, management quality in public schools is low, and ~2σ below high-income countries with comparable data. Second, private schools … have higher management quality, driven by much stronger people management. Third, people management quality is correlated …