**Firm sampling.** Our survey targeted three prominent sectors in manufacturing: carpentry, metal fabrication and grain milling. As revealed by the latest Census of Business Establishments conducted by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in 2010, these are sectors that: (i) employ a large share of workers and (ii) are not dominated by microenterprises with no paid employees. The first criterion implies that we target sectors that are important for policy, whereas the second criterion allows us to focus on labor relationships and human resource management within the firm, which is a key focus of this paper.

We conducted a door-to-door listing of all the firms in our three sectors in the 52 sampled sub-counties, identifying close to 3,000 firms. For each firm in the listing, we recorded their sector of operation and GPS coordinates. This means that we virtually have geo-coded data on the universe of firms in our sampled sub-counties and sectors.<sup>20</sup> We then randomly selected about 1,000 firms from our listing to be included in the survey, oversampling firms with five or more employees. In firms selected for the survey, we interviewed the owner<sup>21</sup> and all the employees working on the main product.<sup>22</sup> As described in Bassi et al. (2021): (i) compliance with the survey was high at over 90%; (ii) all the results from our survey are appropriately weighted to reflect our sampling strategy.

**Survey design.** Our survey was designed to study firm performance, firm location choices, adaptation to pollution and awareness of pollution as a problem, as well as the role of managerial ability. On firm performance, we collected information on revenues and profits per worker as well as wages. On firm location, in addition to collecting GPS coordinates, we asked the firm owner to indicate the reasons behind their location choice, including also detailed information on how firms access customers (e.g., whether orders are placed in person or by phone, whether the firm relies on shipping etc.). We also collected information about the size of the business premises and their rental value. On adaptation to pollution, we asked detailed questions about any investments made by the firm owner to protect their workers from pollution exposure, such as providing masks and other protective gear. We also asked about organizational strategies to protect workers from pollution, such as allowing flexibility in commuting times and work schedules to avoid exposure to traffic pollution at rush hour. Importantly, we asked employees about whether they feel that managers are taking active steps to protect them from pollution exposure. In addition, we included multiple questions to measure employees’ awareness of

> 20Appendix Figure A16 plots the firms in the listing in one of the study sub-counties.

> 21In our sample, firm owners also actively manage the firm operations in most cases. Therefore, we use the terms firm owners and managers interchangeably in the paper.

> 22More precisely, as discussed in Bassi et al. (2021), for each of the three sectors we pre-specified one “core product” that is commonly produced by firms in that sector. For instance, in carpentry, this is doors. If a firm produced the pre-specified core product, we interviewed all employees working on that product. If a firm did not produce the pre-specified core product, we interviewed all employees working on the main product of the firm. See Bassi et al. (2021) for more details, where we verify also that most firms produce the core product that we asked about in the survey, and that this makes up a large share of revenues for the average firm.

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