Field work

This project aims to examine the impact of reducing both supply- and demand side information constraints through a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) with the goal of increasing female labor force participation (FLFP). Our demand-side intervention will involve informing managers (N = 400) at apparel firms about female-intensive firms' success and incentivizing them to visit these role-model firms. Our supply-side intervention will involve women and their families (N = 4000) with job and factory environment information and incentivize them to visit firms to see firsthand what working conditions are like and the amenities provided for female workers. Finally, we will combine both interventions to assess their potential combined effect in a third treatment condition. We will then measure the impact of these interventions on increasing FLFP and spillover effects within women’s close social networks.

We study the impact of a community-driven development (CDD) program targeting only women on social, political, and economic empowerment. Our intervention combines social mobilization and support packages for poor households. We randomized the treatment across 23 clusters of settlements and sampled 2290 households from 150 settlements. We find indication that the intervention might have increased information about local government for the whole sample and strong evidence for strengthened perceptions about political participation, as well as access to public goods for women who assume a leadership role. We can only identify such heterogeneous effects on self-selected female leaders because our control group also received treatment and selected leaders after the midline. We find no significant effects on intrahousehold decision-making, household’s economic well-being, and social cohesion.

In this study, we conduct a firm-level survey of 400 Pakistani textile and apparel manufacturers that builds on a similar survey that we conducted in 2015 to construct a unique panel dataset to test the hypothesis that innovation is conducive to employment generation and sales growth, and that this is especially the case for smaller and younger companies. We aim to provide unique metrics to measure technological innovation, to understand the managerial structures, and the female labor force constraints from the demand side.

In this survey, we study innovation activities of firms in the textiles sector of Pakistan during through a survey based measures. The survey will be conducted across a sample of N = 600 textile firms in Punjab and Sindh. The survey will measure both the technological (product and process) and the non-technological (organizational and marketing). Through this survey, we will measure ‘innovation’ in the context of low-tech developing country settings. The study will test:

• How innovative is the textiles sector of Pakistan ?

• What are the correlates (both in terms of promoting and hampering) of innovation?