the garment sector in Honduras and Bangladesh. The first study concludes that the maquila sector in Honduras not only has contributed to curb the gender gap in terms of wages but it also helped to reduce poverty. By setting the maquila wage premium to zero in wage income micro-simulations, they estimate that on average, the maquila premium by itself accounted for 0.31 percentage points in the reduction of the poverty incidence, and 0.44 percentage points when allowing for gender-specific effects. Similarly, Heath and Mobarak (2015) find that the rise of the garment industry in Bangladesh is associated with a lower risk of early marriage and childbirth for girls, both because girls postponed marriage and stayed in school to enhance their human capital. By taking advantage of the variation in the dates in which garment firms opened in the country, as well as the distance to the households from which data were collected, they estimate hazard models for age at marriage and age at first birth for girls with different exposure to factory jobs.

This paper also relates to a large body of literature that explores the relationship between labor outcomes and export-led growth in developing countries. As summarized nicely in Bernard, Jensen, Redding, and Schott (2007), export-oriented sectors are beneficial for economic development. Not only do they create more employment (particularly in low-income countries as suggested by Mammen and Paxson (2000)) and pay higher wages (Alvarez and Lopez, 2005; Arnold and Hussinger, 2005; Van Biesebroeck, 2005; De Loecker, 2007 and Sinani and Hobdari, 2010), they are also more productive and a source of innovation and technological progress.

# **3 Data and Descriptive Statistics**

The data used in the analysis are drawn from the Cambodian Socio-Economic Survey (CSES), a comprehensive household survey collected by the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) to measure the living conditions of the population. It contains data on characteristics of the household, its consumption and various sources of income as well as individual-level data on education, economic activities, and health, among other factors. The survey is representative at the national level, and it is used both by the government and the World Bank to calculate poverty estimates. We use the 2011 wave of the CSES, as this is the latest year with a migration module, containing detailed information on the sector of employment and whereabouts of the migrants. This is key to our identification strategy given the profile of the workers employed in the garment sector: young females who migrate from rural areas to Phnom Penh, where most of garment firms are located (Kotikula, Pournik, and Robertson, 2015). This is confirmed in our sample where in 32 percent of the households that participate in the garment sector, the household member employed in the garment sector is a migrant.

The data were collected from a sample of 3,518 households across Cambodia. Of those, 19 percent participate in the garment and apparel sector, where participation is defined as having at least one member of the household (migrant or living in the household) employed in the garment sector.<sup>5</sup> These garment households are identified on the basis of NIS-specific occupation codes,<sup>6</sup> when the member of

> 5The retained sample remains close to the original CSES 2011 comprising 3,592 households of which 74 (only 2 percent of households) were dropped due to missing values for some covariates of interest.

> 6Individuals whose occupation is described with the following NIS codes are identified as garment workers: 737 Rope

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