1 Introduction

Why are some firms so much more productive than others making similar products with similar technology? For decades the persistent dispersion in firm productivity was treated as a residual an unexplained "measure of our ignorance." A body of field-experimental and quasi-experimental work has since shown that a good deal of it is causal and manipulable: management practices, work arrangements, and information can be changed, and productivity moves in response. This roundup collects five influential studies that brought credible causal identification to the economics of the firm. Each entry states the research question, the identification strategy, the headline result, and a one-sentence takeaway.

2 Does management matter? A field experiment in Indian textiles

• Citation. Bloom et al. [2013], "Does Management Matter? Evidence from India," Quarterly Journal of Economics.
• Question. Are differences in management practices a cause of productivity differences, or merely correlated with unobserved firm quality?
• Identification. A randomised controlled trial: large Indian textile firms were randomly assigned to receive intensive, free management consulting (treatment) or a lighter diagnostic (control), so the change in practices is exogenous to firm quality.
• Result. Adopting modern management practices raised plant-level productivity by roughly 17% in the first year, and led firms to expand and open more production plants. Practices that looked obviously beneficial had gone unadopted for years, pointing to informational and organisational barriers rather than optimising choice.
• Takeaway. Management is a technology: changing it causally raises productivity, and many firms were leaving large gains on the table.

3 Working from home: a Chinese call-centre RCT

• Citation. Bloom et al. [2015], "Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment," Quarterly Journal of Economics.
• Question. Does letting employees work from home raise or lower their productivity?
• Identification. A randomised experiment at a large travel agency: call-centre employees who volunteered were randomly assigned to work from home or remain in the office for nine months, isolating the causal effect of the work arrangement.
• Result. Home working raised performance by about 13%, driven by more calls per minute (a quieter environment) and fewer breaks and sick days. Attrition fell by half. Yet many workers chose to return to the office when later given the choice, citing isolation so the productivity gain and the workers' revealed preferences pointed in different directions.
• Takeaway. Remote work can causally raise measured productivity, but selection and preferences complicate any blanket policy conclusion.

4 Management and the Marshall Plan

• Citation. Giorcelli [2019], "The Long-Term Effects of Management and Technology Transfers." American Economic Review.
• Question. Do management-training and technology transfers have persistent causal effects on firm performance?
• Identification. A natural experiment from the post-war U.S. Productivity Program: Italian firms had applied to send managers on U.S. training trips and to receive technology transfers, but budget cuts cancelled a subset of already-approved participations plausibly exogenous variation in who actually received the treatment among the pool of approved applicants.
• Result. Firms whose managers received U.S. management training saw higher productivity, sales, and survival, with effects persisting for over a decade; technology transfers helped too but faded faster. Management training was the more durable intervention.
• Takeaway. Management know-how, once transferred, produces long-lived causal gains- evidence that the practices themselves, not transient shocks, drive performance.

5 Broadband and firm performance in Africa

• Citation. Hjort and Poulsen [2019], "The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa," American Economic Review.
• Question. Does access to fast internet raise employment and firm productivity in developing economies?
• Identification. A difference-in-differences design exploiting the staggered arrival of submarine internet cables on Africa's coasts and the terrestrial network's gradual reach, comparing locations connected to the backbone before versus after arrival, relative to not-yet-connected areas.
• Result. Fast internet raised the employment rate by around 7% on average, with larger gains for skilled workers; firm entry, productivity, and exporting rose. The effect operated partly through new firm creation and expanded trade.
• Takeaway. Digital infrastructure has first-order causal effects on firm activity and jobs, concentrated among higher-skilled workers.

6 Contract structure and productivity: soccer-ball producers in Pakistan

• Citation. Atkin et al. [2017], "Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan," Quarterly Journal of Economics.
• Question. If a new technology cuts costs, why do firms fail to adopt it?
• Identification. A field experiment: researchers invented a cutting technology that reduces material waste, then randomly offered it to soccer-ball producers, and in a second randomisation provided a lump-sum payment to the cutter employee whose piece-rate pay the technology would otherwise reduce.
• Result. Adoption was strikingly low despite clear cost savings, because the technology hurt the earnings of piece-rate cutters, who then resisted it. The incentive-payment treatment aligning the worker's pay with adoption substantially raised take-up.
• Takeaway. Organisational and incentive misalignment, not the technology's merits, can block productivity-enhancing adoption a within-firm principal-agent barrier.

7 Synthesis

Across these studies a consistent lesson emerges: the productivity gap between firms is, to a meaningful degree, causal and addressable. Management practices, work arrangements, information, infrastructure, and internal incentives each move productivity when changed exogenously and each was frequently left unoptimised, pointing to informational frictions and organisational barriers rather than frictionless profit maximisation. Methodologically, the frontier moved from productivity accounting to productivity experiments, importing the credibility revolution's tools RCTs, staggered DiD, and quasi-experiments from administrative shocks into the black box of the firm.

References

Atkin, D., Chaudhry, A., Chaudry, S., Khandelwal, A. K., and Verhoogen, E. (2017). Organizational barriers to technology adoption: Evidence from soccer-ball producers in Pakistan. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(3), 1101-1164.

Bloom, N., Eifert, B., Mahajan, A., McKenzie, D., and Roberts, J. (2013). Does management matter? Evidence from India. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 128(1), 1-51.

Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., and Ying, Z. J. (2015). Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165-218.

Giorcelli, M. (2019). The long-term effects of management and technology transfers. American Economic Review, 109(1), 121-152.

Hjort, J., and Poulsen, J. (2019). The arrival of fast internet and employment in Africa. American Economic Review, 109(3), 1032-1079.[cite: 23]