A quick glance at agricultural input use data from developing countries reveals a large dispersion in take up of improved inputs and practices across farms. One explanation is that this is a problem resulting from limited information, credit constraints, risk, poor input quality, and/or...

Between 2008 and 2010, the authors worked with a leading global consulting company to attempt to improve management in Indian textile firms. They conducted a randomized experiment involving 28 plants in 17 firms in the woven cotton fabric industry. These were large firms, with an average of 270...

This paper explores heterogeneity in soil quality, lack of knowledge, and autonomy as explanations for the low adoption of improved agricultural practices. The paper uses data from a randomized field experiment that combined localized soil analyses, tailored input recommendations, extension...

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...

We construct an individual-level dataset of partnership contracts in late nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro to study the determinants of contract terms. We show that partners with limited liability contributed more capital and received lower draws for private expenses and lower profit shares...

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...

The productivity of firms in developing countries appears to be extremely low. Prior work, such as that summarized in James Tybout (2000) and World Bank (2004), has highlighted a set of issues around infrastructure, informality, regulations, trade policies, and human capital that reduce the...