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Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Economics Division at Columbia Business School.
My research primarily focuses on working conditions, labor rights, and firm productivity in developing countries. I am especially interested in how the intersection of global supply chains with local institutions affect firms’ and workers’ outcomes and how labor market institutions affect economic development.
I am a Research Fellow at CEPR (organizational economics). I am affiliated to BREAD, J-PAL, the Chazen Institute for Global Business, and the Columbia Center for Development Economics and Policy (CDEP). I am also an International Growth Centre (IGC) lead academic for Bangladesh.
Curriculum Vitae (Link)
E-mail: l.boudreau@columbia.edu
Working Papers
Multinational enforcement of labor law: Experimental evidence on strengthening occupational safety and health (OSH) committees (Conditionally accepted, Econometrica)
Previously titled: “Multinational enforcement of labor law: Experimental evidence from Bangladesh’s apparel sector”
Supplementary Materials
Coverage:
Trade Talks Interview (Podcast); Review by ProMarket; VoxDev Talks Interview (Podcast); The Daily Star (Bangladesh)
Policy briefs: International Growth Centre Blog Post; Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business Research Brief; J-PAL Summary
Annually, work-related mortality is responsible for 5-7% of all global deaths, and at least 1-in-9 workers experience non-fatal occupational accidents (ILO, 2019a,b). Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) committees are considered the key worker voice institution through which to improve workplace safety and health (ILO, 1981). I present evidence of OSH committees’ causal effects on workers and on factories. To do so, I collaborated with 29 multinational apparel buyers that committed to enforce a local mandate for OSH committees on their suppliers in Bangladesh. With the buyers, I implemented a nearly year-long field experiment with 84 supplier factories, randomly enforcing the mandate on half. The buyers’ intervention increased compliance with the OSH committee law. Exploiting the experimental variation in OSH committees’ strength, I find that stronger OSH committees had small, positive effects on objective measures of safety. These improvements did not come at a cost to workers in terms of wages or employment or to factories in terms of labor productivity. The effects on compliance, safety, and voice were largest for factories with better managerial practices. Factories with worse practices did not improve, and workers in these factories reported lower job satisfaction; this finding suggests complementarity between external enforcement and internal capacity in determining the efficacy of regulation.
Union Leaders: Experimental Evidence from Myanmar – with Rocco Macchiavello, Virginia Minni, and Mari Tanaka (Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Review)
Supplementary Materials
Coverage: VoxDev Column; Faculti Video
Policy brief: J-PAL Summary
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 personality traits that enable them to influence others and ability but 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 set-up, leaders increase mobilization through coordination. Leaders empower social movements by building consensus that encourages mobilization.
We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harassment in organizations. To do so, we partner with a large Bangladeshi garment manufacturer and experiment with different designs of phone-based worker surveys. “Hard’’ garbling (HG) responses to sensitive questions, i.e., automatically recording a random subset as complaints, increases reporting of physical harassment by 290%, sexual harassment by 271%, and threatening behavior by 45%, from reporting rates of 1.5%, 1.8%, and 9.9%, respectively, under the status quo of direct elicitation. Rapport-building and removing team identifiers from responses do not significantly increase reporting. We show that garbled reports can be used to consistently estimate policy-relevant statistics of harassment, including: How prevalent is it? What share of managers is responsible for the misbehavior? and, How isolated are its victims? In our data, harassment is widespread, the problem is not restricted to a minority of managers, and victims are often isolated within teams.
Refereed Publications
Migrants, experience, and working conditions in Bangladeshi Garment Factories– with Rachel Heath and Tyler McCormick (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2024), 219, 196–213)
Non-Refereed Publications
Global Value Chains in Developing Countries: a Perspective from Coffee and Garments -with Julia Cajal-Grossi and Rocco Macchiavello (Journal of Economic Perspectives (2023), 37(3), 59–86) – Coverage: VoxDev Podcast
VoxDevLit on International Trade, Co-Editor (Senior Editors David Atkin and Amit Khandelwhal)
Work in Progress
Escrow Mechanisms for Group-based Reporting: Evidence from Bangladesh’s Garments Sector – with Sylvain Chassang and Ada González-Torres (PAP accepted via pre-results review at the Journal of Development Economics)
Relationships and Responsibility – with Julia Cajal-Grossi, Canyon Can, and Rocco Macchiavello
Social Norms and Firm Productivity: Evidence from Bangladeshi Knitwear Factories – with Sakib Mahmood and Oren Reshef
The Roles of Information and Search Frictions in Determining Working Conditions in Bangladesh’s Apparel Sector – with Md. Shakil Ahmed and Rachel Heath
Market-based Information to Predict Small Firms’ Marginal Returns to Capital and Other Business Support Services – with Amanda Awadey and Elwyn Davies
Laura Boudreau 