We study how managers mitigate the negative impacts of environmental shocks. Pairing productivity data from a garment firm with granular measures of air pollution, we show that productivity suffers as a result of pollution shocks but that managers respond by reallocating particularly sensitive workers to improve worker-to-task matches, thus mitigating team productivity losses. Responses are smaller for more inattentive managers; these same managers are also least able to mitigate productivity declines. These patterns are confirmed by leveraging variation in opportunities for reallocation and comparing how close managers of differing attentiveness can get to the simulated production frontier by reallocating workers.

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies with circumstance in early life. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the likelihood of severe mental distress in adulthood by 3 percentage points (half the mean prevalence) for cohorts born in cocoa-producing regions relative to those born in other regions. Impacts on related personality traits are consistent with this result. Maternal nutrition, reinforcing childhood investments, and adult circumstance are likely operative channels of impact.