This paper provides a new heterogeneous firm model for trade where firms differ in their productivity and experience different market demand shocks. The model incorporates variations in trade policy, trade preferences, and the rules of origin needed to obtain them, to reflect real world...

Hirschman's (1970) seminal thesis that enabling worker “voice” prevents exit from the employment relationship has played a foundational role in labor economics. We provide the first experimental test of this hypothesis in a real-world setting via a randomized controlled trial in Indian...

Which managerial skills, traits, and practices matter most for productivity? How does the observability of these features affect how appropriately they are priced into wages? Combining two years of daily, line-level production data from a large Indian garment firm with rich survey data on line...

We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from...

We evaluate the causal impacts of on-the-job soft skills training on the productivity, wages, and retention of female garment workers in India. The program increased women's extraversion and communication, and spurred technical skill upgrading. Treated workers were 20 percent more productive...

Measurement of the full costs and benefits of energy-saving technologies is often difficult, confounding adoption decisions. We study consequences of the adoption of energy-efficient LED lighting in garment factories around Bangalore, India. We combine daily production line-level data with...

While it is by now well known that the privatization of township- and village-run enterprises (TVREs) has been rapidly and widely taking place in China, it is much less known whether and to what extent privatization has improved resource allocation and productivity. As a first step toward the...

Women remain disadvantaged in access to management positions around the world. We conduct a field experiment with 24 large garment factories in Bangladesh to test for inefficient representation of women among line supervisors. We identify the marginal female and male candidates for supervisory...

Financial incentives for teachers to increase student performance is an increasingly popular education policy around the world. This paper describes a school-based randomized trial in over two-hundred New York City public schools designed to better understand the impact of teacher incentives on...

This report summarizes the results of a project which investigated the time series interrelationships between crime, drug use, police, and arrests in New York City. We use monthly data from 1970 through 1990 for New York City. We plot the individual time series for five different non-drug...