- _Are there certain characteristics of firms that adopt compliance requirements?_ We test if certain types of firms are more likely to change compliance behavior within certain types of compliance clusters (including child labor, contracts, discrimination, forced labor, freedom of association, occupational health and safety, and work time).

- _In what compliance clusters are firms more likely to adopt compliance requirements during Better Work Vietnam participation?_ We test whether firms are more likely to adopt compliance requirements in certain compliance clusters, and whether this varies by firm characteristics.

Finally, to understand additional impacts of the Public Disclosure Programme on firm behavior, we also look at two additional questions, namely:

- _Does transparency shift factory efforts to alternative areas of compliance?_ One concern with selecting critical issues to report on is whether firms would only make progress to the critical issues at the expense of other issues. We test whether, after the announcement of the Public Disclosure Programme, firms were less likely to make progress towards compliance in areas outside the 26 critical issues.

- _Does transparency lead some firms to drop out of the program? If so, which ones?_ We test whether firm dropout of the Better Work Vietnam program is greater after the announcement of the Public Disclosure Programme, and whether this varies by firm characteristics.

The Public Disclosure Programme publishes factories’ names along with their compliance (or lack thereof) with certain “critical issues” on a publicly‐available transparency portal.<sup>2</sup> The transparency portal makes key findings from Better Work assessments public, revealing which factories have been found ‘non‐ compliant’ on the critical issues such as occupational safety and health, child labor, forced labor, discrimination, worker compensation, contracts and freedom of association.

A factory’s compliance findings remain on the transparency portal until a new Better Work assessment report is published, at which point the site is updated to reflect just the most recent data. The transparency portal is updated continuously and includes information on factory name, factory type, country, assessment date, cycle number and the number of publicly reported issues found not to comply with international labor standards or national law. The findings are published in English.

The 26 critical issues of the Better Work Vietnam’s Public Disclosure Programme were approved and announced to all factories in August 2015. The program went into implementation in June 2016, and in April 2017 the first compliance reports within the 26 critical issues were made publicly available when the transparency portal went live.

In our analysis, however, we use the full set of data collected in the Compliance Synthesis Report during unannounced visits where monitoring teams of usually two people carry out an assessment of working conditions in participating factories. This data set is available from 2010 through mid‐2018 and includes information on all compliance points, including the 26 critical issues. Data from the Compliance Synthesis Report are subsequently merged with Better Work Vietnam’s Registration Document, which contains

> 2 The transparency portal is available at <u>https://portal.betterwork.org/transparency.</u>

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