In Simple Words
Imagine an athlete hiring a personal coach who teaches them to log every calorie in a notebook. While the coach visits every week, the athlete logs their meals. Once the coaching stops and the daily effort yields no noticeable performance gain, the athlete stops logging and returns to previous habits.
Consulting tailors observed over time
- Six months after start
- 63% kept records
- 24 months after start
- 28% kept records
Same consulting group at two survey rounds. Observed change, not a randomized comparison across times.
See source →Research question
Intensive, personalized management consulting temporarily increases the adoption of formal business practices among microenterprises. However, microentrepreneurs gradually abandon these routines once active advisory support ends if the administrative effort does not yield measurable financial gains.
Participants
N = 160 urban tailors and seamstresses in Accra, Ghana.
Study Design
Randomized field experiment evaluating one-on-one consulting from Ernst & Young (averaging 10 contact hours per tailor over one year) against a control group across 8 survey waves over 24 months.
Results
Record-keeping adoption among consulting recipients surged by 45 percentage points at 6 months (Round 3, p < 0.01) and remained 26 percentage points higher at 12 months (Round 7, p < 0.05), but declined to a statistically insignificant 12 percentage point difference (with only 28% maintaining records) by 24 months (Round 8), 11 months after consulting ceased.
Takeaway
Audit microenterprise management practice retention at 12 and 24 months post-intervention to confirm whether operational changes persist after active advisory support concludes.
Source and citation
See source →Read alongside the research
Plain-English glossary
Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.
- Percentage points
The difference between two percentages.
ExampleA rise from 40% to 50% is 10 percentage points. Relative to the starting value, that is a 25% increase.
Office for National Statistics · Percentages ↗Read more about percentage points →