Abstract: Social movements are catalysts for crucial institutional changes. To succeed, they must coordinate members’ views (consensus building) and actions (mobilization). We study union leaders within Myanmar’s burgeoning labor movement. Union leaders are positively selected on both ability and personality traits that enable them to influence others, yet they earn lower wages. In group discussions about workers’ views on an upcoming national minimum wage negotiation, randomly embedded leaders build consensus around the union’s preferred policy. In an experiment that mimics individual decision-making in a collective action setup, leaders increase mobilization through coordination. 

Abstract: We study differences in markups earned by Bangladeshi garment exporters acrossbuyers with different sourcing strategies and make three contributions. First, we distinguish buyers with a relational versus a spot sourcing strategy and show that a buyer’s sourcing strategy is correlated across products and origins. Buyer fixed effects explain most of the variation in sourcing strategies, suggesting that these depend on organizational capabilities. Second, we use novel data that match quantities and prices of the two main variable inputs in the production of garments (fabric and labor on sewing lines) to specific export orders. We derive conditions under which these data allow measurement of within exporter-product–time differences in markups across orders produced for different buyers. Third, we show that exporters earn higher markups on otherwise identical orders produced for relational, as opposed to spot, buyers. A sourcing model with imperfect contract enforcement, idiosyncratic shocks to exporters, and buyers that adopt different sourcing strategies trading off higher prices and reliable supply rationalizes this and other observed facts in the industry. We discuss alternative explanations and policy implications.

Abstract: Women remain disadvantaged in promotion to managerial positions. We con-duct a field experiment with 24 large garment factories in Bangladesh to test for in-efficient representation of women among line supervisors. We identify the marginalfemale and male candidates for supervisory positions and randomly assign them tomanage production lines. We document four findings: (1) In contrast to widespreadnegative beliefs about women’s ability as supervisors at baseline, female candidatesselected by the factories had similar skills to males; (2) during the trial, females per-formed worse than males, which we show is related to negative bias against them;(3) after the trial, however, many female candidates were retained as supervisorsand, conditional on that, performed similarly to males; and (4) after the end ofour intervention, factories permanently increased the share of women among newlyappointed supervisors. A conceptual framework of experimentation over discrimi-nation rationalizes all these facts and cautions against the standard logic to test fordiscrimination: when there is uncertainty about the performance of the discrimi-nated group, equal – or even worse – performance of the marginal candidates ofthat group is no longer sufficient to rule out inefficient discrimination.

Abstract: Conflicts between management and workers are common and can have significant impacts on productivity. Combining ethnographic, survey and administrative records from a large Bangladeshi sweater factory, we study how workers responded to management’s decision to lay off about a quarter of the workers following a period of labor unrest. Our main finding is that the mass layoff resulted in a large and persistent reduction in the productivity of surviving workers. Moreover, it is specifically the firing of peers with whom workers likely had social connections – friends – that matters. Additional evidence on defect rates suggests a deliberate shading of performance by workers in order to punish the factory’s management.

Abstract: Supply chain disruptions have recently been at the center of both academic and policy debates. After reviewing some of the emerging literature on supply chain disruptions, we discuss the role of buyers' sourcing strategies in mediating responses to such shocks. We focus on two dimensions of a buyer's sourcing strategy: relationality (the extent to which the buyer concentrates its sourcing in a few core suppliers) and just-in-time. On the one hand, theoretical models of sourcing suggest that these are complementary practices and their adoption should be positively correlated in the data. On the other hand, the two dimensions have opposing implications for supply-chain resilience to shocks. We borrow an empirical proxy for a buyer's relationality from Cajal-Grossi et al. (2023) and introduce a new proxy for a buyer's adoption of just-in-time inventory systems. Using data from the apparel global value chain we compute the two proxies and present three results: (a) the variation in both relationality and just-in-time is mostly explained by across-buyer variation, rather than product or country variation, (b) consistent with the theoretical analysis in Taylor and Wiggins (1997), relationality and just-in-time are highly correlated with each other across buyers, (c) at the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic, buyers' overall sourced values declined relatively less for relational buyers but not for buyers with just-in-time inventory systems.