Out of the 150 enterprises in the treatment group, 80 then took up the consulting services.<sup>8</sup> The remaining 70 treatment group enterprises declined to participate in the program although they had initially signed a letter of interest saying that they would participate if offered a spot. The take-up rate was higher among enterprises in the services and manufacturing sectors (56.6% and 53.5%, respectively), compared to enterprises in the commerce sector (48.7%). Most enterprises that chose not to participate said their financial situation had changed since they signed the letter of interest and they no longer had sufficient funds to pay the fee (albeit subsidized) for the consulting services. IPPC paired the 80 treatment group enterprises that took-up the program with consulting firms according to the consultants’ sector and enterprise-size expertise, as well as geographic restrictions. Figure 1 includes a comprehensive project timeline, illustrating how the dates for data collection, randomization, and program implementation line up.

Table 2 provides summary statistics of baseline characteristics for enterprises and their principal decision makers in the treatment and control groups. About 30% of enterprises in each group operated in the manufacturing sector, 25% in the commerce sector, and 45% in the services sector. On average, the enterprises in the study had about 14 full-time paid employees and were slightly over 10 years old. The enterprises’ principal decision makers were on average 43 years old, 72% of them were men, and on average completed 16 years of schooling.

Panel C of Table 2 displays our main measures of business performance, starting with sales (Appendix 1: Surveys and Data Definitions provides details of the survey questions and definitions). Our baseline measure of sales is the average of monthly sales in July, August, and September 2007.<sup>9</sup> This variable varies widely in our sample. At baseline, average sales in the treatment group were US$79,163 with a standard deviation of 288,679, and US$55,258 in the control group, with a standard deviation of 140,493. To reduce the noise in this variable, we winsorize the top 1% of outliers (i.e., we replace the top one percent of sales with the 99<sup>th</sup> percentile of sales). The averages of winsorized sales are more similar across the treatment and control groups (US$66,025 and US$54,923, respectively) than for the

> 8 Due to an administrative error, there was also one control group firm that was invited to participate, and did, in the program. For analysis purposes, we adhere to the random assignment and this enterprise is included in the control group.

> 9 About 2.5 percent of enterprises report zero sales for all three months (this percentage is not statistically different across the treatment and control group). Since these enterprises report having employees, as well as assets, and report non-zero hours worked and costs, we assume that they did not want to report their sales and thus replaced their sales with missing (it is unlikely that they had zero sales in all three months and are still in business). We apply the same procedure to the follow-up data, where about 3.5 percent of both treatment and control enterprises report zero sales for all three months (December 2008, January 2009, and February 2009 in the follow-up survey). Our measure of sales is thus greater than zero for all enterprises.

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