# **3.3 Sample Characteristics by Firm Type**

All analysis splits the sample into firms with and without workers during the weekly panel data period of March and April, 2015. Of the 342 firms in the analysis sample, 184 report no worker activity during any week in that seven week period. The remaining 158 firms, categorized as with workers, reported non-owner working hours for at least one of the seven weeks in the weekly monitoring data. Note that this measure of firms with and without workers is time-invariant, as it is defined as employing non-owner labor inputs at any time during the seven week panel.<sup>12</sup> Baseline characteristic comparisons between one-person and with-worker firms are presented in Table 1.<sup>13</sup> Firms with workers are predictably larger as measured by revenues, profits, and capital assets. They are also more likely to do things like keep formal business records (as measured by the adoption of management practices), register with the municipal government, and become a member of a trade association, evidence that these are more formal firms. Readers should interpret the findings with caution in light of these gravity differences between firms with and without workers; firms with workers are almost tautologically larger than firms without workers.

Perhaps reassuringly, there is no statistical difference between access to any manual or electric sewing machine across firms with and without workers, though firms with workers predictably have more of both. Firms with workers are more likely to report having any electric equipment (including electric sewing machines, but also other electric equipment like electric irons or embroidery machines), though this difference would tend against the finding that one-person firms are differentially negatively affected by unreliable electricity. It is also reassuring that most of the demographics are balanced across the two firm types, including gender, age, ethnicity, educational background, and Ravens (a measure of abstract cognitive ability).

During the panel data collection period, firm owners in one-person firms and in firms with workers both reported blackouts on 31% of days.<sup>14</sup> Among firms with workers, 44% reported at most a single worker reporting to work in a given week, another 22% reported at most two workers in a week, and the remaining 34% reported at least some weeks with at least three workers.

> 12The study defines firms with and without workers using this measure contemporaneous to the main analysis data collection because the labor information in the baseline data (from the February 2014 census) occurs more than a year before the weekly monitoring surveys. Given normal churn in the labor market, defining the firms with workers as those employing non-owner labor in February 2014 adds unnecessary noise to estimates of short term staffing adjustments that the paper argues firms use to cope with blackouts. 20% of firms with workers in March and April of 2015 had no employees as of the February 2014 census and 25% of firms without workers in March and April of 2015 had at least one worker besides the owner in February 2014. Appendix Table 8 estimates the relationship between these annual changes and outages and Section 5 discusses this analysis in more detail.

> 13Appendix Figure 1 shows the location of all sample firms by firm type. The entire sample is within an 11 square kilometer radius.

> 14Firm owners were given the option to report daily power access as blackout, partial blackout, or no blackout. In all specifications partial blackout is coded as a blackout, though the conclusions are robust to classifying partial blackouts as non-blackout days. Unfortunately, the data do not have any more direct measures of blackout duration.

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