In many economic settings, agents lack decision rights but provide input. Intra-household decision-making in contexts with restrictive gender norms is one important example; wives often lack final say over decisions but still give input. Their ability to communicate persuasively while providing...
Firm location decisions are a key managerial choice, usually optimized over factors like proximity to customers or suppliers. These decisions may also impose externalities on the environment, and on other firms due to competitive or agglomerative forces. The inherent endogeneity of location...
How managers frame the adoption of organizational practices may impact the returns to such practices, but managerial justification is often correlated with the use of particular practices or other dimensions of managerial quality. Using a randomized control trial, we study how the causal impacts of...
Formal rules within organizations are pervasive, but may be interpreted and implemented differently by actors within the organization, impacting organizational outcomes. We consider a delegation reform that changed formal rules within the environmental regulator in an Indian state, by giving...
In 2015, in an attempt to combat its poor air quality, India banned the burning of agricultural residues. But bans have not worked, and pollution from fires used to clear fields after harvest has continued making the air quality worse. In Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to...
The sharing economy for a wide range of goods and services is expanding across the world. To direct the benefits from sharing capital services towards small-scale producers, governments in the developing world are increasingly intervening in fast-growing mechanization rental markets. However, the...
Particulate matter significantly reduces life expectancy in India. We use a randomized controlled trial in the Indian state of Punjab to evaluate the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (also known as payments for ecosystem services, or PES) in reducing crop residue burning, which is a major...
What are the gains from mechanization? We run a randomized control trial that subsidizes access to equipment rental markets to study how the adoption of mechanization shifts farming households labor supply, farm productivity and labor demand. The intervention induces greater mechanization in the...
The allocation of decision rights within organizations influences resource allocation, expansion decisions, and ultimately outcomes. Using a newly constructed dataset, I estimate the effects of an earned autonomy program for State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in India. The program gave managers (the...
The assignment of workers to tasks is an important feature of the organization of production within firms. We study how task allocation across workers changes in response to productivity shocks. Pairing hourly productivity data from a ready-made garments firm with granular data on exposure to...
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 womens extraversion and communication, and spurred technical skill upgrading. Treated workers were 20 percent more productive than...
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 weather...