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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.

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.

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 data and estimate a negative, nonlinear productivity-temperature gradient. We find that LED lighting, which emits less heat than conventional bulbs, decreases the temperature on factory floors, and thus raises productivity, particularly on hot days. Using the firm's costing data, we estimate the pay-back period for LED adoption is nearly one-sixth the length after accounting for productivity co-benefits.

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 particulate matter pollution, we show that productivity suffers as a result of pollution shocks; this effect is heterogeneous across workers and tasks. Managers respond by reassigning workers to tasks in which they perform better on average during shocks. This response is larger for managers who we identify, via survey-based measurement, as exhibiting greater managerial attention, and these same managers are also the ones who are most able to mitigate resulting productivity declines.

A key prediction of models of dynamic labor demand is that restrictions on …ring attenuate …rms' employment responses to economic ‡uctuations. We provide the …rst direct empirical test of this prediction using data on industrial …rms in India. We exploit the fact that ‡uctuation in rainfall within districts, through its e¤ects on agricultural productivity, generates variation in local demand and local labor supply. Using a measure of labor regulation strictness, we compare factories' input and output responses to these shocks in pro-worker and pro-employer districts. Our results con…rm the theory's predictions: industrial employment is more sensitive to shocks in areas where labor regulations are less restrictive. We verify that our results are robust to controlling for endogenous …rm placement and vary across factory size in the pattern predicted by the institutional features of labor laws in India.

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I study how the misallocation of new technology to individuals who have low ex post returns to its use affects learning and adoption behavior. I focus on antimalarial 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.