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We test whether living through conflict in childhood changes political beliefs and engagement. We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1945 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries. Exposure from ages 0 to 14 has a very small standardized impact on later attitudes and behaviors. This finding is robust to migration and holds across a variety of definitions, specifications, and sources of data. Our results suggest that at the population level in Africa, conflict does not alter political beliefs, though the most exposed sub-populations may experience large, lasting effects.

Enabling worker voice could improve worker retention and effort by providing workers the chance to improve their situation or an outlet to express discontent. We provide a test of this hypothesis via a randomised controlled trial in Indian garment factories. Just after what proved to be a disappointing wage hike, workers were chosen at random to participate in an anonymous survey in which they were asked for feedback on job conditions, supervisor performance and overall job satisfaction. Enabling voice in this manner reduced turnover and absenteeism after the hike, particularly for the most disappointed workers.

Mental health disorders are a substantial portion of the global disease burden, yet their determinants are understudied, particularly in developing countries. We find that temperature shocks in utero increase depressive symptoms in adulthood in Africa. A ten percent increase in heat exposure increases our depression indices .05 to .07 standard deviations. We find no evidence that the effects of these shocks are smaller for more recent birth cohorts, nor do shocks predict greater treatment of depressive symptoms. Temperature fluctuations, increasingly frequent due to climate change, worsen the mental health disease burden and health care systems in Africa do not mitigate these impacts.

Economic development can be driven by large, high-performing firms that provide safe, dignified jobs with living wages. The garment manufacturing industry is a large, economically important sector concentrated in low- and middle-income countries; however, it has been characterized by persistent neglect of workers’ concerns and working conditions. This case study explores whether digital communication platforms, combined with improvements in management, can empower garment factory workers to voice their concerns and have their grievances addressed. We describe a series of randomized experiments testing the effectiveness of different grievance reporting solutions, finding that access to an anonymous complaint service improves worker satisfaction and reduces absenteeism. However, these simple solutions do not adequately address issues around management trust, accountability, and quality. An ongoing experiment explores whether grievance reporting technology, combined with team-based performance incentives for management, can further improve outcomes for workers.

Do productivity and managerial quality vary within the firm? If so which managerial traits and practices matter most for team productivity? Combining granular garment production data with survey data on managers across 120 production lines in India, we document substantial productivity dispersion both across teams producing overlapping products and within team over the course of production runs, and structurally link this variation to a comprehensive assessment of supervisor quality. We find that factors related to managerial attention and control are the most important for enabling line productivity, both more impactful than traditionally emphasized dimensions like cognitive skills and tenure. We document that one mechanism by which specific managerial practices contribute to productivity is by way of enabling faster learning-by-doing. In-sample pay patterns suggest potential net gains from screening for or training in less readily measured dimensions of managerial quality, as pass-through of productivity contributions to pay is incomplete.

El siguiente articulo contribuye al estudio del fenomeno migratorio desde Venezuela en Colombia mediante un analisis de sus efectos y desafios sobre el ajuste de la economia. El presente articulo se divide en dos modulos. En el primero se describe y se caracteriza la poblacion migrante desde Venezuela en terminos socio-economicos y demograficos y se indaga acerca sobre sus patrones de consumo y ahorro. En el segundo modulo se estudian las implicaciones del choque migratorio en tres diferentes esferas (i) el mercado laboral, principalmente se estudia el efecto sobre las tasas de ocupacion, participacion, desempleo y formalidad (ii) el el impacto fiscal que representa para la nacion y, por ultimo, (iii) el efecto en las variables macroeconomicas. Particularmente se estudia la respuesta de la politica monetaria ante el choque migratorio y la reaccion de la brecha del Producto Interno Bruto (PIB) y la curva de Phillips ante escenarios con un mayor flujo de migracion.

We study the adoption of energy-efficient LED lighting in garment factories around Bangalore, India. Combining daily production line–level data with weather data, we estimate a negative, nonlinear productivity-temperature gradient. We find that LED lighting raises productivity on hot days. Using the firm's costs data, we estimate that the payback period for LED adoption is less than one-third the length after accounting for productivity co-benefits. The average factory in our data gains about $2,880 in power consumption savings and about $7,500 in productivity gains.

Smallholder agricultural commodity suppliers in developing countries are often vulnerable to global commodity price fluctuations. Using panel data on farmers from an area of Tanzania where most farmers grow coffee, this study finds that global coffee prices matter for household outcomes, through their effects on farmgate prices, coffee sales and revenues, and household expenditures. The article documents that households cope with coffee price busts by increasing enterprise ownership, an effect that is greater for households without access to other means of coping. Comparisons of mean outcomes of enterprises operated by coper households (which operated an enterprise only in periods of low coffee price) with those of stayer households (which operated an enterprise throughout the sample period) indicate that the former are less likely to be profitable or to hire workers.

Go/no-go decisions require engineering design teams to evaluate whether a concept is worth further investment of resources. These decisions can be difficult when product success depends on multiple stakeholders in addition to the end-user. This study proposes the Stakeholder Agreement Metric (SAM) framework to estimate the level of agreement between stakeholder preferences via the distance between optimal designs calculated from a preference model derived from conjoint analysis. The framework was compared to the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) in an empirical case study describing the design and piloting of a hand tool for informal electronic waste workers in Thailand. Data from a follow-up assessment indicate the SAM estimate aligned with future metrics of stakeholder satisfaction. The study further demonstrated AHP may have practical limitations due to survey requirements. This study suggests that the SAM framework is a promising tool to further explore as a way to support designers making go/no-go decisions which involve multiple stakeholders.

Evidence suggests that natural resources have driven conflict and underdevelopment in modern Africa. We show that this relationship exists primarily when neighboring regions are resource-rich. When neighbors are resource-poor, own resources instead drive economic growth. To motivate the empirical study of this set of facts, we present a simple model of parties engaged in potential conflict over resources, revealing that economic prosperity is a function of equilibrium conflict prevalence, determined not just by a region's own resources but also by the resources of its neighbors. Structural estimates confirm the model's predictions, and reveal that conflict equilibria are more prevalent where institutional quality is worse.

Background: Dispelling misinformation during crises is of critical importance. But information can also induce distress, which can lead to poor decision-making. We ask whether delivering correct information hurts or improves mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods: We randomly assigned a sample of low-income migrant workers to receive Covid-19-related information through text messages, a pre-recorded audio message, or (live) phone calls. Results: Misinformation was rampant at baseline. Phone calls led to the greatest increase in Covid-19-related knowledge, particularly among those without smartphones. They also reduced depression and anxiety substantially. The amount of information delivered explains gains in knowledge, but not improvements in mental health. Conclusions: These results suggest that governments reconsider the dependence on text messages and pre-recorded audio given the mental health improvements created by live phone calls. Trial Registration: The trial was pre-registered with the American Economic Association's Trial Registry (doi: 10.1257/rct.5947). Funding: Good Business Lab funded the data collection and interventions. Declaration of Interests: Adhvaryu and Nyshadham disclose that they are members of the Board of Directors and serve as Chief Development Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, respectively, at Good Business Lab. None of the authors has any financial interest in GBL. Ethics Approval Statement: This study was approved by Good Business Lab's Ethics Committee in India (Identifier: GBL0520) and University of Michigan Human Subjects Research Committee in the United States (Office of Human Research Protections Registration Number: IRB00000246). We obtained informed consent from all study participants.

Go/no-go decisions require engineering design teams to evaluate whether a concept is worth further investment of resources. These decisions can be difficult when product success depends on multiple stakeholders in addition to the end-user. This study proposes the Stakeholder Agreement Metric (SAM) framework to estimate the level of agreement between stakeholder preferences via the distance between optimal designs calculated from a preference model derived from conjoint analysis. The framework was tested in an empirical case study describing the design and piloting of a hand tool for informal electronic waste workers in Thailand. Data from a follow-up assessment indicate the SAM estimate aligned with future metrics of stakeholder satisfaction. The case study also qualitatively compared SAM to the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Data collection issues with AHP illustrated some of the practical limitations of the framework. This study suggests that the SAM framework is a promising tool to further explore as a way to support designers making go/no-go decisions that involve multiple stakeholders. Further exploration should include additional case studies to investigate potential outcomes of different SAM values and comparing multiple stakeholder groups.

Introduction and Aims: Of the Indian population, 2.7% have alcohol dependence, the most severe of alcohol use disorders. Alcohol use disorders have previously been found to be correlated with a range of negative economic outcomes, but dependent drinking has yet to be causally identified as a poverty trap. We use qualitative data as the first step towards identifying the mechanisms that may underlie a dependent drinking driven poverty trap in India. Design and Methods: Thirty-six in-depth interviews were conducted and analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Participants were men having probable alcohol dependence (n = 11), doctors (n = 13) who come into contact with patients presenting with alcohol dependence at government hospitals and clinics, and family members of men with probable alcohol dependence (n = 12) in Goa, India. Results: Our key findings showed that families of those who have alcohol dependence have less opportunity for saving, more job instability and poor treatment opportunity to aid recovery and allow escaping from the trap. Discussion and Conclusions: Households in Goa, India with a member with alcohol dependence display patterns consistent with a poverty trap, though the mechanisms derived from these qualitative data need to be further demonstrated by longitudinal quantitative data to corroborate a causal relationship between alcohol use disorders and poverty.

How do firms pair workers with managers, and which constraints affect the allocation of labor within the firm? We characterize the sorting pattern of managers to workers in a large readymade garment manufacturer in India, and then explore potential drivers of the observed allocation. Workers in this firm are organized into production lines, each supervised by a manager. We exploit the high degree of worker mobility across lines, together with worker-level productivity data, to estimate the sorting of workers to managers. We find negative assortative matching (NAM) -that is, better managers tend to match with worse workers, and vice versa. This stands in contrast to our estimates of the production technology, which reveal that if the firm were to positively sort, productivity would increase by 1 to 4 percent across the six factories in our data. Coupling these findings with a survey of managers and with data on multinational brands and the orders they place, we document that NAM arises, at least in part, because the value of buyer relationships imposes minimum productivity constraints on each production line. Our results emphasize that suppliers to the global market, when they are beholden to a small set of powerful buyers, may be driven to allocate managerial skill to service these relationships, even at the expense of productivity. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

We study the role of household enterprise as a coping mechanism after health shocks. Using variation in the cost of traveling to formal sector health facilities to predict recovery from acute illness in Tanzania, we show that individuals with prolonged illness switch from farm labor to enterprise activity. This response occurs along both the extensive (entry) and intensive (capital stock and labor supply) margins. Family members who are not ill exhibit exactly the same pattern of responses. Deriving a simple extension to the canonical agricultural household model, we show that our results suggest complementarities in household labor.

Do merit-based recruitment policies encourage individuals to climb socioeconomic ladders? We provide evidence from historical Taiwan, where elite bureaucrats were recruited through a civil service examination. Quotas for successful candidates were set based on the 1948 populations of individuals’ native provinces in mainland China, resulting in highly preferential quotas for certain groups. This system was abruptly replaced in 1962 by a uniform admissions policy. We leverage this variation to study the impacts of differential access to elite bureaucratic posts. We find that the additional incentives created by preferential quotas increased human capital accumulation and resulted in better long-run economic outcomes.

Dust pollution in West Africa increases infant and child mortality. Employing differences in differences, we make three contributions. First, using data from 12 poor countries, we highlight the vulnerability of people with few resources, fragile health, and limited capacity to adopt avoidance behavior. Second, we examine prenatal and post-natal parental investment responses, and show evidence consistent with compensating behaviors. However, despite these efforts, the health of surviving children is still adversely affected. Third, we investigate differential impacts over time and across countries. We find declining effects over time, implying in the absence of reductions in dust itself that societies are adapting in some way. Using national-level measures of macroeconomic conditions and public health resources, we find suggestive evidence that both economic development and public health improvements have contributed to this adaptation, with health improvements seemingly playing a stronger role.

Severe environmental shocks have grown in frequency and intensity due to climate change. Can policy protect against the often devastating human impacts of these shocks, particularly for vulnerable populations? We study this question by leveraging data from a situation in which a tornado tore through an area involved in a double-blind cluster-randomized controlled trial of at-birth vitamin A supplementation in Bangladesh. Tornado exposure in utero and in infancy decreased birth size and physical growth, and increased the incidence of severe fevers. But infants who received vitamin A supplementation, which boosts immune system functioning, were protected from these effects. Tornado impacts and protective effects were both substantially larger for boys. Our results suggest that wide-scale supplementation policies would generate potential health benefits in disaster-prone areas of low-income countries.

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 managers, we find that several key dimensions of managerial quality, like attention, autonomy, and control, are important for learning-by-doing as well as for overall productivity, but are not commensurately rewarded in pay. Counterfactual simulations of our structural model show large gains from screening potential hires via psychometric measurement and training to improve managerial practices.

We study how managers mitigate the negative impacts of environmental shocks. Pairing productivity data from a garment firm with granular measures of air pollution, we show that productivity suffers...

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 garment factories. Just after what proved to be a disappointing wage hike, workers were chosen at random to participate in an anonymous survey in which they were asked for feedback on job conditions, supervisor performance, and overall job satisfaction. Enabling voice in this manner reduced turnover and absenteeism after the hike, particularly for the most disappointed workers. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Conjoint experiments (CEs) provide designers with insights into consumer preferences and are one of several user-based design approaches aimed at meeting users’ needs. Traditional CEs require participants to evaluate products based on two-dimensional (2D) visual representations or written lists of attributes. Evidence suggests that product representations can affect how participants perceive attributes, an effect that might be exacerbated in a Low- and Middle-Income Country setting where CEs have seldom been studied. This study examined how physical three-dimensional (3D) prototypes and 2D renderings with written specifications of attribute profiles generated differences in estimated utilities of a CE about a hypothetical new tool for electronic-waste recycling, among workers in North-Eastern Thailand. Two independent CEs were performed with each representation form. Ninety participants across both experiments each ranked three sets of five alternative tool concept solutions from most to least preferred. The results of the conjoint analysis guided the design of a tool optimized for user preferences, which was then distributed to half of the sample through a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak auction experiment. One month after the auction, participants completed an endline survey. The results point toward potential differences in relative importance of different product attributes based on product representation. Price was found to have no significant impact on the valuation of tools in either experiment. The differences in relative importance of product attributes may have been explained by the limitations of 2D renderings for conveying sizes. Further research is needed to understand the impact of product representation on preferences in this context. We recommend careful consideration for product representations – specifically, how well the representations convey all product attributes being evaluated – in CEs. Using a combination of 2D renderings and 3D product features might have satisfied both the speed and low-cost advantages of renderings while enabling participants to have a better sense of product features.

In 1924, the Morton Salt Company began nationwide distribution of iodine-fortified salt. Access to iodine, a key determinant of cognitive ability, rose sharply. We compare outcomes for cohorts exposed in utero with those of slightly older, unexposed cohorts, across states with high versus low baseline iodine deficiency. Income increased by 11%, labor force participation rose 0.68 percentage points, and full-time work went up 0.9 percentage points due to increased iodine availability. These impacts were largely driven by changes in the economic outcomes of young women. In later adulthood, both men and women had higher family incomes due to iodization.

Can investing in children who faced adverse events in early childhood help them catch up? We answer this question using two orthogonal sources of variation – resource availability at birth (local rainfall) and cash incentives for school enrollment – to identify the interaction between early endowments and investments in children. We find that adverse rainfall in the year of birth decreases grade attainment, post-secondary enrollment, and employment outcomes. But children whose families were randomized to receive conditional cash transfers experienced a much smaller decline: each additional year of program exposure during childhood mitigated more than 20 percent of early disadvantage.

Background HIV infection has profound clinical and economic costs at the household level. This is particularly important in low-income settings, where access to additional sources of income or loans may be limited. While several microfinance interventions have been proposed, unconditional cash grants, a strategy to allow participants to choose how to use finances that may improve household security and health, has not previously been evaluated. Methods We examined the effect of an unconditional cash transfer to HIV-infected individuals using a 2 × 2 factorial randomized trial in two rural districts in Uganda. Our primary outcomes were changes in CD4 cell count, sexual behaviors, and adherence to ART. Secondary outcomes were changes in household food security and adult mental health. We applied a Bayesian approach for our primary analysis. Results We randomized 2170 patients as participants, with 1081 receiving a cash grant. We found no important intervention effects on CD4 T-cell counts between groups [mean difference 35.48, 95% credible interval (CrI) -59.9 to 1131.6], food security [odds ratio (OR) 1.22, 95% CrI: 0.47 to 3.02], medication adherence (OR 3.15, 95% CrI: 0.58 to 18.15), or sexual behavior (OR 0.45 95% CrI: 0.12 to 1.55), or health expenditure in the previous 3 weeks (mean difference $2.65, 95% CrI: -9.30 to 15.69). In secondary analysis, we detected an effect of mental planning on CD4 cell count change between groups (104.2 cells, 9% CrI: 5.99 to 202.16). We did not have data on viral load outcomes. Conclusion Although all outcomes were associated with favorable point estimates, our trial did not demonstrate important effects of unconditional cash grants on health outcomes of HIV-positive patients receiving treatment.

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 than controls post-program. Wages rise very modestly with treatment (by 0.5 percent), with no differential turnover, suggesting that although soft skills raise workers’ marginal products, labor market frictions are large enough to create a substantial wedge between productivity and wages. Consistent with this, the net return to the firm was large: 258 percent eight months after program completion.

Productivity differences across firms and countries are surprisingly large and persistent. Recent research reveals that the country-level distributions of productivity and quality of management are strikingly similar, suggesting that management practices may play a key role in the determination of worker and firm productivity. Understanding the causal impacts of these practices on productivity and the effectiveness of various management interventions is thus of primary policy interest.

Do parents invest more in higher quality children, or do they compensate for lower quality by giving more to children with lower endowments? We answer this question in the context of a large-scale iodine supplementation programme in Tanzania. We find that children with higher programme exposure were more likely to receive necessary vaccines and were breastfed for longer. Siblings of treated children were also more likely to be immunised. Fertility behavior and investments at the time of birth were unaffected.

I study how the misallocation of new technology to individuals, who have low ex post returns to its use, affects learning and adoption behaviour. I focus on anti-malarial treatment, which is frequently over-prescribed in many low-income country contexts where diagnostic tests are inaccessible. I show that misdiagnosis reduces average therapeutic effectiveness, because only a fraction of adopters actually have malaria, and slows the rate of social learning due to increased noise. I use data on adoption choices, the timing and duration of fever episodes, and individual blood slide confirmations of malarial status from a pilot study for a new malaria therapy in Tanzania to show that individuals whose reference groups experienced fewer misdiagnoses exhibited stronger learning effects and were more likely to adopt.

We study the effects of accessing better healthcare on the schooling and labor supply decisions of sick children in Tanzania. Using variation in the cost of formal-sector healthcare to predict treatment choice, we show that accessing better healthcare decreases length of illness and changes children’s allocation of time to school and work. Children attend school for more days per week—but not for more hours per day—as a result of accessing better healthcare. There are no significant effects on child labor, but the results suggest that time spent in physically strenuous activities such as farming and herding increases.

HIV/AIDS is drastically changing the demographic landscape in high-prevalence countries in Africa. The prime-age adult population bears the majority of the mortality burden, and these "missing" prime-age adults have implications for the socioeconomic well-being of surviving family members. This study uses a 13-year panel from Tanzania to examine the impacts of prime-age mortality on the time use and health outcomes of older adults, with a focus on long-run impacts and gender dimensions. Prime-age deaths are weakly associated with increases in working hours of older women when the deceased adult was coresident in the household. The association is strongest when the deceased adult was living with the elderly individual at the time of death and for deaths in the distant past, suggesting that shorter-run studies may not capture the full extent of the consequences of adult mortality for survivors. Holding more assets seems to buffer older adults from having to work more after these shocks. Most health indicators are not worse for older adults when a prime-age household member has died, although more distant adult deaths are associated with an increased probability of acute illness for the surviving elderly. For deaths of children who were not residing with their parents at baseline, the findings show no impact on hours worked or health outcomes.

Improving access to the formal health care sector is a primary public health goal in many low-income countries. But the returns to this access are unclear, given that the quality of care at public health facilities is often considered inadequate. We exploit temporal and geographic variation in the cost of traveling to formal sector health facilities to show that treatment at these facilities improves short-term health outcomes for acutely ill children in Tanzania. Our results suggest that these improvements are driven in part by more timely receipt of and better adherence to antimalarial treatment. (JEL I11, I12, I15, I18, J13, O15)

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the likelihood of severe mental distress in adulthood by 3 percentage points (or half the mean prevalence) for cohorts born in cocoa-producing regions relative to those born in other regions. Impacts on related personality traits are consistent with this result. Maternal nutrition, reinforcing childhood investments, and adult circumstances are operative channels of impact.

A key prediction of dynamic labor demand models is that firing restrictions attenuate firms' employment responses to economic fluctuations. We provide the first direct test of this prediction using data from India. We exploit the fact that rainfall fluctuations, through their effects on agricultural productivity, generate variation in local demand within districts over time. Consistent with the theory, we find that industrial employment is more sensitive to shocks where labor regulation is less restrictive. Our results are robust to controlling for endogenous firm placement and vary across factory size in a pattern consistent with institutional features of Indian labor law. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We test whether early-life war exposure influences later-life political engagement in Africa. We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1945 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries. Exposure from ages 0 to 14 has a very small (standardized) impact on later attitudes and behaviors. Our results are robust to migration, and hold across several definitions, specifications, and sources of data. Our results are consistent with recent studies demonstrating that, on average, individuals and localities recover quickly from the destructive effects of conflict, though those most exposed experience large and prolonged effects.

Objectives Mental health disorders account for 13% of the global burden of disease, a burden that low-income countries are generally ill-equipped to handle. Research evaluating the association between mental health and employment in low-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, is limited. We address this gap by examining the association between employment and psychological distress. Methods We analyzed data from the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey using logistic regression (N = 5,391 adults). In multivariable analysis, we estimated the association between employment status and psychological distress, adjusted for covariates. We calculated lost productivity from unemployment and from excess absence from work that respondents reported was because of their feelings of psychological distress. Findings Approximately 21% of adults surveyed had moderate or severe psychological distress. Increased psychological distress was associated with increased odds of being unemployed. Men and women with moderate versus mild or no psychological distress had more than twice the odds of being unemployed. The association of severe versus mild or no distress with unemployment differed significantly by sex (P-value for interaction 0.004). Among men, the adjusted OR was 12.4 (95% CI: 7.2, 21.3), whereas the association was much smaller for women (adjusted OR = 3.8, 95% CI: 2.5, 6.0). Extrapolating these figures to the country, the lost productivity associated with moderate or severe distress translates to approximately 7% of the gross domestic product of Ghana. Conclusions Psychological distress is strongly associated with unemployment in Ghana. The findings underscore the importance of addressing mental health issues, particularly in low-income countries.