In columns 4 to 7 we focus on organizational strategies to limit pollution exposure. Specifically, workers were asked if avoiding pollution on the commuting route was an important reason why they could arrive late at work and/or may leave work early (columns 4 and 5), and if managers allow them flexibility in working hours to avoid being exposed to such pollution (columns 6 and 7). The means of these dependent variables are low: only around 6-13% of workers are allowed such flexibility by managers. The coefficients on our measures of manager quality are positive and significant in both cases. For instance, column 6 shows that a one standard deviation increase in managerial quality leads to an increase in the probability that workers report being granted flexibility in commuting by 5.6 percentage points, or 42% relative to the mean.

While in columns 4 and 6 we do not control for worker characteristics, in columns 5 and 7 we add a host of employee controls to disentangle whether this effect is driven by differential sorting of workers to higher quality managers or by higher quality managers actually treating their workers differently.<sup>41</sup> Our coefficient of interest is remarkably stable when employee-level controls are added, which confirms that the results are more consistent with higher quality managers treating their workers differently. At the end of this section, we perform additional checks to show that the role of sorting in explaining our results is limited. This reinforces the conclusion that the differential investments of high quality managers in protecting their workers are a direct result of their ability as managers.

In columns 8 and 9 we create a dummy equal to one if the worker reported that their manager is careful in trying to avoid exposing them to pollution. Again, we find a positive and significant coefficient on our index of managerial quality in these regressions, which is very stable when employee level controls are included.

Taken together, these results show that while investments by managers in protecting workers are overall low, higher quality managers are better able to protect their workers from pollution exposure.<sup>42</sup> Interestingly, this is not just the consequence of higher quality managers having more financial resources to purchase protective equipment; rather, it also reflects the adoption of different organizational strategies to time production and employee commute such that peaks in road traffic and hence pollution levels, are avoided. This is consistent with higher quality managers being better aware of the negative consequences of pollution on worker productivity.

Finally, it is worth noting that columns 4-9 of the table are obtained from a survey of workers, and do not use, apart from the independent variable (i.e., the index of managerial ability), any information provided by managers. Therefore, our results cannot be contaminated by any reporting bias correlated with managerial ability. Emphasizing the overall result again, 41Employee controls include the employee’s education, age, age squared, cognitive ability (measured through a Raven matrices test), tenure (in years), vocational training (dummy). When explicitly noted, we also control for the employee’s log(salary).

> 42The low overall level of investment in protecting workers from pollution is consistent with the findings of the literature on management practices, which shows that managerial quality is substantially lower in developing countries (Bloom et al. 2013).

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