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Learning, Misallocation, and Technology Adoption: Evidence from New Malaria Therapy in Tanzania

Review of Economic Studies 2014 81(4), 1331-1365 open access
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.

Managerial Quality and Productivity Dynamics

Review of Economic Studies 2023 90(4), 1569-1607 open access
Do productivity and managerial quality vary within the firm? If so which managerial traits and practices matter most for team productivity? Combining granular garment production data with survey data on managers across 120 production lines in India, we document substantial productivity dispersion both across teams producing overlapping products and within team over the course of production runs, and structurally link this variation to a comprehensive assessment of supervisor quality. We find that factors related to managerial attention and control are the most important for enabling line productivity, both more impactful than traditionally emphasized dimensions like cognitive skills and tenure. We document that one mechanism by which specific managerial practices contribute to productivity is by way of enabling faster learning-by-doing. In-sample pay patterns suggest potential net gains from screening for or training in less readily measured dimensions of managerial quality, as pass-through of productivity contributions to pay is incomplete.