Fante languages. The term was first used during the electricity rationing program associated with a severe drought in 1997, and gained prominence again after the West Africa Gas Pipeline damage in 2012.<sup>4</sup> The Electricity Commission of Ghana (ECG) published official substation-level load shedding schedules from late 2012 to March 6th, 2015 which typically classified service areas in 6, 12, or 24 hour blocks as lights on, lights off, or standby. For two reasons, this study focuses on firm-owner self-reports, including time (and firm) fixed effects that extract plausibly exogenous variation not predicted by the official load shedding schedules. First, publicly-available load shedding schedules concluded on March 6th, 2015, only seven weekdays into the panel data collection period, and due to rolling entry into the weekly survey sample, only three days into the portion of the panel data collection period that includes all firms in the sample. Secondly, ECG load shedding schedules block together all firms in the sample under the Hohoe substation as a single service area. The authors, the research team, and the firm owners in the sample, however, can attest from experience that variation across firms within 12 hour blocks was the norm.<sup>5</sup> Anecdotally the load shedding schedules became less and less reliable as the crisis wore on into late 2014 and into the hot harmattan season of early 2015. Protests were widespread and though the study focuses on the tail-end of the 2012-15 crisis, it studies a period of long, erratic, and politically-salient blackouts.

# **2.2 Garment Making**

Bespoke garment making firms are ubiquitous in many parts of Africa and the developing world. Ghana is no exception. Nearly all garments produced by these small firms are made-to-order, for special occasions like funerals and weddings, as dress attire for church, for work in government offices on African-wear Fridays, or simply as everyday clothing. A fraction of shops also produce ready-made garments or supply larger school uniform contracts, but exporting or selling to large distributors is rare. In the study sample, the best selling product in about 70% of firms was bespoke womenswear, another 25% of firms reported bespoke menswear as the most commonly produced item, and less than 5% of the sample reported specializing in some other type of garment (e.g. wedding dresses, school uniforms, hand-made bags). The product mix is fairly gender segregated, though there is no difference in the product mix between with and without workers.

Production of bespoke garments can be undertaken via a combination of three different production technologies: by hand using a needle and thread, using a manual hand or foot crank sewing machine, or using an electric sewing machine, in order of increasing productivity. 97% of the firms in the sample have

> 4The West Africa Gas Pipeline, the first of its kind in Africa, transports natural gas from Nigeria to Benin, Togo, and Ghana, and began service in 2009. The pipeline was damaged by pirates trying to board an oil tanker off the coast of Togo in 2012. Interruption in the supply of natural gas continued through 2013.

> 5In this paper’s appendix, we present the official load shedding schedule for the relevant dates, discuss variation over time and across firms in the sample, provide information on some unofficial ex-post load shedding records the research team was able to obtain, and document the relationship between the official and unofficial schedules and the self-reported blackout data exploited in the paper.

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