tailieunhanh - THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

As with records in other formats, electronic records must be managed through their entire life cycle from creation, when the records are created or received; through their active life, when the records are accessed frequently (at least once a month); through their inactive life, when the records are no longer active but have to be retained for a period of time for legal, fiscal, administrative, or historical reasons; until their final disposition which could be destruction or preservation as a permanent record | THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS Vol. 128 February 2013 Issue 1 DOES MANAGEMENT MATTER EVIDENCE FROM INDIA NICHOLAS Bloom Benn Eifert Aprajit Mahajan David McKenzie John RObERTS A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on management practices to randomly chosen treatment plants and compared their performance to a set of control plants. We find that adopting these management practices raised productivity by 17 in the first year through improved quality and efficiency and reduced inventory and within three years led to the opening of more production plants. Why had the firms not adopted these profitable practices previously Our results suggest that informational barriers were the primary factor explaining this lack of Financial support was provided by the Alfred Sloan Foundation the Freeman Spogli Institute the International Initiative the Graduate School of Business at Stanford the International Growth Centre the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences the Kauffman Foundation the Murthy Family the Knowledge for Change Trust Fund the National Science Foundation the Toulouse Network for Information Technology and the World Bank. This research would not have been possible without our partnership with Kay Adams James Benton and Breck Marshall the dedicated work of the consulting team of Asif Abbas Saurabh Bhatnagar Shaleen Chavda Rohan Dhote Karl Gheewalla Kusha Goyal Manish Makhija Abhishek Mandvikar Shruti Rangarajan Jitendra Satpute Shreyan Sarkar Ashutosh Tyagi and Ravindra Vasant and the research support of Troy Smith. We thank the editor Larry Katz six anonymous referees our formal discussants Susantu Basu Francesco Caselli Ray Fisman Naushad Forbes Casey Ichniowski Vojislov .