Going Back to India: Does Management Matter in the Long Run?

Nick Bloom ran a highly successful management experiment between 2008-2010 in Mumbai, India. His randomized control trial across 28 plants of 17 firms on the adoption of basic modern management practices found that management interventions lead to significantly improved management practice; significantly enhanced performance; and that firms enjoyed a spill-over of successful practices across plants within the same firm. Bloom will now go back to these firms 8 years after our initial contact to do a long-run follow-up. This follow-up would collect data including management data (what they are doing, why, and if they dropped practices why), performance data (output, employment, plant numbers, machine numbers, inventories, quality, etc), use of consultants (did the intervention spur this on), expansion of the business (we saw indications that the intervention led to such expansion), and CEO interviews on longer-run perspectives. Encouraged by the strong interest in the original paper, Bloom believes there will be a similarly strong interest in the follow-up – indeed the frequent question to him of “what happened in the long-run” spurred him to do this research.