TY - RPRT A1 - Iacovone, Leonardo A1 - Maloney, William F. A1 - Tsivanidis, Nick T1 - Family Firms and Contractual Institutions N2 - This paper offers new evidence on the relationship between contractual institutions, family management, and aggregate performance. The study creates a new firm-level database on management and ownership structures spanning 134 regions in 11 European countries. To guide the empirical analysis, it develops a model of industry equilibrium in which heterogeneous firms decide between family and professional management when the latter are subject to contracting frictions. The paper tests the model's predictions using regional variation in trust within countries. Consistent with the model, the finding show that there is sorting of firms across management modes, in which smaller firms and those in regions with worse contracting environments are more likely to be family managed. These firms are on average 25 percent less productive than professionally managed firms, and moving from the country with the least reliable contracting environment to the most increases total factor productivity by 21.6 percent. Family management rather than ownership drives these results. Y1 - 2019 UR - http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/139191554304091289/Family-Firms-and-Contractual-Institutions ET - no. WPS 8803 ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Iacovone, Leonardo A1 - Maloney, William F. A1 - McKenzie, David John T1 - Improving Management with Individual and Group-Based Consulting: Results from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia N2 - Differences in management quality are an important contributor to productivity differences across countries. A key question is then how to best improve poor management in developing countries. We test two different approaches to improving management in Colombian auto parts firms. The first uses intensive and expensive one-on-one consulting, while the second draws on agricultural extension approaches to provide consulting to small groups of firms at approximately one-third of the cost of the individual approach. Both approaches lead to improvements in management practices of a similar magnitude (8-10 percentage points), so that the new group-based approach dominates on a cost-benefit basis. Moreover, authors find some evidence that the group-based intervention led to increases in firm size over the next 1.5 years, including a statistically significant increase in employment, while the impacts on firm outcomes are smaller and statistically insignificant for the individual consulting. The results point to the potential of group-based approaches as a pathway to scaling up management improvements. Y1 - 2018 UR - http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/121371546237097316/Improving-Management-with-Individual-and-Group-Based-Consulting-Results-from-a-Randomized-Experiment-in-Colombia ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Iacovone, Leonardo A1 - Maloney, William A1 - McKenzie, David T1 - Improving Management in Colombian Firms Through Individual and Group Consulting T2 - Finance & PSD Impact Y1 - 2019 UR - https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/31843/Improving-Management-in-Colombian-Firms-Through-Individual-and-Group-Consulting.pdf?sequence=1 VL - 53 IS - June 2019 ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Iacovone, Leonardo A1 - Maloney, William A1 - McKenzie, David T1 - Improving Management with Individual and Group-Based Consulting Results from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia T2 - World Bank Group: Policy Research Working Paper 8854 Y1 - 2019 UR - http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/166671557929384690/pdf/Improving-Management-with-Individual-and-Group-Based-Consulting-Results-from-a-Randomized-Experiment-in-Colombia.pdf ER -