The Impact of Consulting Services on Small and Medium Enterprises: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Mexico
By Miriam Bruhn, Dean S. Karlan, Antoinette Schoar. Journal of Political Economy, 2013
358 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A randomized control trial with 432 small and medium enterprises in Mexico shows positive impact of access to 1 year of management consulting services on total factor productivity and return on assets. Owners also had an increase in “entrepreneurial spirit” (an index that measures entrepreneurial confidence and goal setting). Using Mexican social security data, we find a persistent large increase (about 50 percent) in the number of employees and total wage bill even 5 years after the program. We document large heterogeneity in the specific managerial practices that improved as a result of the consulting, with the most prominent being marketing, financial accounting, and long-term business planning.
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/368f7dd69a74afee750b834a7e6592643bf2bc22
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Accounting
In Economics and Econometrics
- Robert Metcalfe
- Michela Giorcelli
- John A. List
- John Van Reenen
- Greer K. Gosnell
- Imran Rasul
- Jayson L. Lusk
- Thomas Brown
Citations in the corpus
- The Impact of Management Practices on Employee Productivity: A Field Experiment with Airline Captains (2019, methodology): “For instance, Bruhn et al. (2018) find that small- to medium-sized enterprises in Mexico do not use particular management consulting services because they lack the funds, do not have knowledge of potential benefits, or simply have not considered the possibility.”
- The Long-Term Effects of Management and Technology Transfers (2019, background): “A few recent studies evaluate the causal effect of management on firm performance using randomized control trials (RCTs, Bloom et al., 2013; Bruhn et al., 2017).”
- Increasing differences between firms: market power and the macro-economy (2018, background): “And a number of randomized control trials and natural experiments suggests that this correlation is causal (e.g., Bloom et al. 2013, Bruhn et al. 2017 and Giorcelli 2017).”