Third, we cannot rule out that the company kept track of who we trained and kept workers because they knew they were trained, although this information was not shared with the company. While this could contribute to the employment retention effects, positive wage effects for workers who left the company would not be driven by this. This suggests that our results are not driven by the company keeping track of trained workers. Observations from the field also do not support this hypothesis. Supervisors tend to be in close contact with their workers, and closely monitor their behavior. Given how important it is for the company to be able to rely on workers to perform responsibly in these roles, it is unlikely that the company would not take into account the actual performance of workers in their performance evaluations.

Overall, the evidence is supportive of a mechanism whereby our intervention affected worker conscientiousness and this in turn affected their labor market outcomes, although more research is needed to better measure conscientiousness skills in such contexts.

# **3.3. Potential limitations**

We note two limitations to our study. First, end-line data collection took place after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and it is possible that our intervention interacted with the pandemic. For example, given that the training aimed to make individuals more conscientious, it is possible that they were more careful during the pandemic and lost their jobs due to wanting to stay at home rather than run the risk of exposure to the virus by going to work. On the other hand, more conscientious individuals might have felt a greater responsibility to go to work. To measure whether the intervention affected the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of the workers, the end-line survey asked a number of questions on how the pandemic impacted their livelihoods. One set of questions asked respondents to compare current incomes and expenditures to before the start of the pandemic, specifically in February 2020. We do not find any significant differences in the extent to which treated and control individuals reported lower incomes, lower transfers and gifts, higher health expenditures, lower savings or more borrowing (see Appendix Tables E.1 and E.2).<sup>32</sup> We find that individuals in the control group reported having taken more measures to prevent the spread of the virus but do not find any differences in the rate at which treatment and control individuals displayed symptoms, or lost their main source of income as a result of COVID-19. We are not aware of any specific policies that the construction company had in place due to the fact that it was involved in the construction of public infrastructure to prevent the spread of COVID-19 other than the general restrictions followed by everyone in the country. Overall, this suggests that the intervention did not interact with the pandemic directly or through the improved labor market outcomes. The statistical significance of this result is not, however, robust to adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing and so should be treated with caution. 32We only find a small statistically significant difference for education expenditures, which is higher for the control group.

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