A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this, the authors ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms, providing free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly...

Beginning in 2008, the authors conducted a randomized controlled trial that changed management practices in a set of Indian weaving firms (Bloom et al. 2013). In 2017 the plants were revisited and the authors found three main results. First, while about half of the management practices adopted...

Management has a large effect on the productivity of large firms. But does management matter in micro and small firms, where the majority of the labor force in developing countries works? This study developed 26 questions that measure business practices in marketing, stock-keeping,...

Using detailed survey data on management practices, this paper uses recent advances in unconditional quantile analysis to study the changes in the within country distribution of management quality associated with country convergence to the managerial frontier. It then decomposes the contribution...

Internal labor migration rates in India have been largely static and low in recent times compared with those in other countries. This is a cause for concern because internal migration for economic reasons can promote the agglomeration of economic activity in more productive locations and...

Definitions of catch-up growth in anthropometric outcomes among young children vary across studies. This paper distinguishes between catch-up in the mean of a group toward that of a healthy reference population versus catch-up within the group, associated with a narrowing of the outcome...

This paper estimates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral and North-South-East-West Highways in India on welfare, social inclusion, and environmental quality. The analysis uses district-level data for 1994-2011 and the difference-in-difference method. The results suggest that the highways...

This paper presents axiomatic arguments to make the case for distribution-sensitive multidimensional poverty measures. The commonly-used counting measures violate the strong transfer axiom which requires regressive transfers to be unambiguously poverty-increasing and they are also invariant to...

This paper incorporates gender bias against girls in the family, school and labor market in a model of intergenerational persistence in schooling where parents self-finance children's education because of credit market imperfections. Parents may underestimate a girl's ability, expect lower...

This study reports the findings of a large-scale, multiple-arm, cluster-randomized control study carried out in rural Punjab, India, to assess the impact of a flagship sanitation program of the Government of India. The program, the Clean India Mission for Villages, was implemented between...