Dummies for house ownership and superior quality of the dwelling unit’s walls are negatively related with garment participation, while the inverse is true for households who have access to water and electricity. The coefficient on the dummy for urban residence is negative but not significant, except in Column 4, probably reflecting the fact that rural households are more likely to participate in the apparel and textile industry by sending a member to work in garment factories located in the cities.<sup>22</sup> Finally, an increase in the size of the household raises the likelihood of participating in garment whereas a high dependency ratio reduces it due to the lower number of working-age members with respect to dependents.

# **5.2 Results from the Matching Estimators**

Table 3 presents ATT estimates of participating in the garment sector on the welfare indicators of interest at the household level: consumption per capita, poverty, extreme poverty, poverty gap index, asset index, food insufficiency, and school enrollment. Results from the kernel matching suggest that the share of the past 12 months for which households declare having experienced food insufficiency is 0.9 percentage points lower for garment households. Similarly, the proportion of children aged 6-14 attending school is 3.3 percentage points higher among garment households relative to the control group. While the size of the effect is modest, the ATT estimates on school enrollment range from 4.7 to 5.8 percentage points and are slightly larger when considering the nearest-neighbor matching methodology but they convey the same qualitative message that children aged 6-14 years enjoy higher school enrollment rates when at least one adult in the household works in garment factories. This result is line with Heath and Mobarak (2015) who show that exposure to garments jobs promotes the educational attainment of girls, contributing to close the gender enrollment gap. Likewise, it also complements the evidence presented by Kotikula, Pournik, and Robertson (2015) showing that working in the textile and apparel industry raises school attainment. Turning to monetary measures of welfare, the ATT estimates on poverty, extreme poverty and the poverty gap bear the expected negative sign but are statistically insignificant. However, garment participation appears to be negatively associated with consumption per capita and asset ownership, with coefficients of 9 percent and 1.1 percentage points respectively (using kernel matching).

Nonetheless, the sign of the point estimates on consumption and asset ownership is reversed when the treatment effect is analyzed for households in the bottom 40 percent of the consumption distribution, the reference population for _shared prosperity_ .<sup>23</sup> The results for this subset of the total sample are summarized in Table 4. For the poorest households, participation in the garment sector raises per capita consumption by 3 percent and enhances asset ownership by 2.4 to 3.2 percentage points. As expected, benefits in terms of reduced exposure to food insufficiency and increased school enrollment appear even larger for the least well-off: food insufficiency is 1.7 percentage points lower for garment households, while school enrollment is 9.3 percentage points higher. While the size of the effect on consumption, assets and food insufficiency is modest, the one on school enrollment is substantial. As before, nearest-neighbor matching yields the largest ATT estimates, with coefficients on school enrollment ranging from 12.9 to 13.6 percentage points.

> 2277 percent of treated households reside in rural areas. Rural concentration of garment households is even starker when the treatment variable is restricted to garment participation through a migrant member: in this case 90 percent of garment households are rural dwellers. The corresponding figure unsurprisingly falls to 73 percent when the treatment excludes participation to garment via migration and solely focuses on garment workers who are currently residing in the household.

> 23This indicator is defined by the World Bank as the consumption growth of the bottom 40 percent of the distribution.

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