Violence against women is persisting in many parts of the world. At the same time, there is a global trend of increased female labour force participation. In this paper we study the effect on intimate partner violence of a large public work program in India that explicitly encourages female...

This paper explores the aggregate economic effects from India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which provides up to 100 days of labor to rural laborers at the mandated minimum wage. We examine the within-district change to night-time lights and banking deposits using the...

This paper analyzes how local leaders make targeting decisions in the context of a public workfare program in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The study finds that village heads are progressive in their targeting, prioritizing the poorer households in their villages. The study benchmarks...

As a bottom-up approach, a Job Guarantee policy can tackle the issue of unemployment on the macroeconomic, socioeconomic, and individual level in a unique way and promote the social inclusion of the unemployed. This paper aims at analysing the potential obstacles - namely inflationary pressure...

This paper shows how favoritism in public procurement can emerge despite the use of rigid procedures for awarding contracts and of transparent criteria for allowing firms to bid.The paper analyzes data on the awarding of public works in Italy to illustrate how differences in fine regulation...

Does existing inequality hinder redistributive policies that aim to help the poor? This paper answers this question under a widely used redistributive policy in developing countries--public works schemes. Using district-level data on land ownership distributions and the implementations of the...

Public works programs (PWPs) in sub-Saharan African countries have re-emerged as an important policy to stimulate employment generation in addition to their protective role such as consumption smoothening. The paper reviews evidence on the extent to which empirical research can substantiate the...