1 percent level) and showed more improvement in business practices than women who were assigned just to the basic training. This additional attention cost twice as much as the basic training alone.

# _Individual Consulting_

A related literature looks at the impact of providing consulting services on a one-on-one basis to firms in order to improve business and management practices. The closest to the business training experiments is the work of Karlan et al. (2012), who study a mix of 160 male and female tailors in Ghana with 5 or fewer workers. They used local consultants from Ernst and Young in Ghana, who met with the tailors in visits of 30 minutes to 1 hour several times a month over one year, with the average firm receiving 10 hours of consultant time over a year, at zero cost to the firm. In addition some firms receive grants of around US$133. They find some of the consultants recommendations were adapted for some months, but had been abandoned one year after training stopped. There is no significant impact of either treatment on profits or revenues, with some specifications showing negative effects in the short-run, although power is very low and confidence intervals wide.

Bruhn et al. (2012) evaluate a state government program in Puebla, Mexico, which paired small businesses with a consultant from one of several local consulting firms. Consultants spent approximately four hours per week over a year assisting the firm in overcoming constraints to growth. 432 firms applied to the program, and 150 were chosen to receive heavily subsidized consulting services (the cost was about 10% of the commercial rate). The mean number of employees was 14, and 72 percent were male-owned. The training impact was assessed with a single follow-up survey one to three months after the consulting. The authors find large point estimates for the impacts on sales and profits, which are sometimes significant depending on the measure used and the extent of trimming. However, the study faces many of the same challenges as the business training studies reviewed above. First, the firms in the sample are very heterogeneous, with the baseline coefficient of variation of sales of 3.7 –and 2.4 even after trimming the top 1 percent. Second, despite all firms signing a statement of interest, only 80 out of the 150 firms (53 percent) assigned to treatment decided to take it up. Third, attrition rates are reasonably high and there is additional item non-response on profits and sales even among those who are interviewed, so that only 288 firms (66.7 percent) provided data on profits in the follow-up survey. The combination of high heterogeneity and reduced take-up lowers power. Combined with the high attrition rates this means any bounding exercise would give non-informative bounds for impacts on profits and sales. These are likely to be challenges facing any similar government program offering subsidized consulting or business services to firms, such as the matching grant programs used in many World Bank private sector loans.

The final individualized consulting study is Bloom et al. (2012), who focus on a much smaller sample of 17 large textile firms in India, with the typical firm having 270 employees, 2 plants, and sales of US$7.5 million per year. They provide 11 of these firms with five months of free intensive consulting provided by Accenture Consulting, with the consultants averaging 781 hours per treated plant, spending their time attempting to get the firms to implement 38 key management practices related to quality control, factory operations, inventory, human resource management, and sales and order management. They deal with the problem of small sample size by focusing on very homogeneous firms and collecting lots of 19