On” crisis. The sample consists of garment-making firms with access to electricity in Hohoe, Ghana, a mid-size district capital in the Volta Region. The study combines daily firm-level data on electricity outages and labor hours with weekly panel data on wages paid, revenues, and profits, to estimate the effects of blackouts on firm outputs and input choices. All specifications include time and firm fixed effects to control for blackout propensity variation across days and across firms, extracting plausibly exogenous variation in daily exposure to blackouts. High-frequency micro data on firm-level exposure to power outages, firm inputs, and firm outputs is rare, which is one reason why research on the impact of blackouts is so limited, despite the ubiquity of rolling blackouts in many developing countries. The panel dataset of small garment-making firms in Ghana analyzed in this paper offers an unusual opportunity to estimate direct Findings reveal that frequent power outages have disproportionately negative impacts on the profitability and productivity of single-person firms. Among single-person firms, _each_ additional blackout day in a workweek is associated with a 10% decrease in weekly revenues and a 13% decrease in weekly profits. Point estimates are nearer to zero for firms that have access to workers during the period of the panel data collection, and the analysis is unable to reject that these firms experience no profit or revenue decreases in response to blackouts.

This heterogeneity in output effects suggests differential success in adapting production to cope with unreliable infrastructure, and that these coping strategies may center around labor inputs. Oneperson firm owners decrease their intensive and extensive labor supply on days with outages, without compensating for those lost hours on days when the power is restored. Aggregated to the weekly level, one-person firm owners reduce their weekly labor supply by 5% for each blackout weekday, utilizing labor as the primary input to contract production in response to changes in productivity. These productivity shifts, however, not only contract hours and outputs, they also have a statistically significant negative effect on profits per owner hour worked, which decrease by 16%. As is standard in the literature, these estimates of profits do not exclude income or wages paid to the owner; profit reductions are reductions in earned income for the owner-operators of single-person firms and reductions in profits per owner hour worked are reductions in hourly wages.

On a weekly basis, the analysis cannot reject that outages have no effect on the labor supply of firm owners in firms with workers. Rather, the study documents a dynamic reshuffling of firm owner labor supply across days, suggestive evidence of dynamic adjustments in the production process in response to blackouts. On days with lights following a blackout day, firm owners increase both intensive and extensive labor supply by about 5% each; on the second of two consecutive blackout days, firm owners decrease their intensive labor supply by about 20 minutes; on blackout days following a day with lights, there is no measurable effect on firm owner labor supply.<sup>3</sup>

> 3These intertemporal daily labor supply findings contribute to a debate in labor economics regarding labor supply elasticity across more and less productive work time, though this context is complicated by the fact that firm owners with

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