SMU SOE Seminar Series (October 23, 2025): Did Consumers Punish Rana Plaza Firms? Evidence from Apparel Sales

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ABSTRACT

This paper examines whether the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 garment workers, affected consumer demand for global apparel brands. We combine brand-level sales data from Euromonitor, covering 47 countries over 2008–2018, with information on firms identified by NGOs as buyers from factories located in the collapsed building. Using a difference-in-differences design with a triple-difference across countries, we test whether these “Rana firms” experienced a decline in sales after the disaster relative to other apparel brands. We find no evidence of consumer punishment: Rana firms exhibit a marginally more positive, albeit statistically insignificant, sales trajectory compared to non-Rana companies. Only when exploiting cross-country variation in media coverage do we detect a modest decline in sales for brands more frequently cited in the domestic press.

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