A Tale of Two Programs : Assessing Treatment and Control in NREGA Studies
This paper revisits impact evaluation studies on the largest public workfare in the world, NREGA. In an environment where randomization is not feasible, I show why an impact evaluation exercise on NREGA should acknowledge the existence of an older...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/undefined/123811635968088739/A-Tale-of-Two-Programs-Assessing-Treatment-and-Control-in-NREGA-Studies http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36486 |
| Summary: | This paper revisits impact evaluation
studies on the largest public workfare in the world, NREGA.
In an environment where randomization is not feasible, I
show why an impact evaluation exercise on NREGA should
acknowledge the existence of an older program, SGRY. Using
novel district-level expenditure data on SGRY, this article
shows how ignoring the older program is likely to
underestimate the general equilibrium impact of the
employment policy on various relevant socio-economic
outcomes. In most cases, ignoring SGRY underestimates
NREGA’s impact by 30–40 percent. |
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