This paper evaluates a large urban public works program randomly rolled out across neighborhoods of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We find that the program increased public employment and reduced private labor supply among beneficiaries and improved local amenities in treated locations. We then combine...

Public infrastructure procurement is crucial as a prerequisite for public and private investments and for economic and social capital growth. However, low performance in execution severely hinders infrastructure provision and benefits delivery. One of the most sensitive phases in public...

Many low- and middle-income countries have introduced Public Works Programmes (PWPs) to fight poverty. PWPs provide temporary cash-for-work opportunities to boost poor households' incomes and to provide better infrastructure to local communities. While PWPs do not target children directly, the...

Project duration is an important metric in the assessment of public works procurement and consists of the time taken to complete the three major sub-phases (design, awarding and execution). The overall duration may be influenced by various factors such as project characteristics, local market...

In our study, we set out to present the characteristics of public workers between 2011 and 2019 based on the comprehensive and anonymous administrative database of the Hungarian State Treasury (MÁK). During the years under review, altogether 676 thousand people were involved in the programme....

Ghana's public works program, Labour-Intensive Public Works (LIPW), was initiated in 2010 with the goal of providing short-term employment opportunities to the poorest and building community assets. Public works programs have the potential to promote social inclusion by benefiting vulnerable...

Prevailing wage laws, which require that construction workers employed by private contractors on public projects be paid at least the wages and benefits that are "prevailing" for similar work in or near the locality in which the project is located, have been the focus of an extensive policy...

More than one billion people worldwide receive cash or in-kind transfers from social assistance programs. In low-income countries, these transfers are often conditioned on participation in labor-intensive public works to rehabilitate local infrastructure or natural resources. Despite their...

Public procurement accounts for around 12% of global GDP and 63% of expenditures are managed by subnational governments across OECD countries. In Italy, municipalities can impose penalties on contractors for breaches of contract, for example delays in delivery, often leading to contractors suing...

This article presents the first experiment exploring the impact of debarments - the exclusion of colluding bidders - on collusion in procurement auctions. We find that debarments and their most common alternative, fines, reduce collusion and bids relative to a market with no sanction. 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...

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...

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...

This paper focuses on the relationship between efficiency of infrastructure provision and the institutional characteristics of procurers. We study this relationship for the Italian public work procurement system characterized by a very large number of procurers mainly of small size. The...

The study uses a sample of 3,876 youths to estimate the impact of Ghana's Labour Intensive Public Works (LIPW) program on youth employment and seasonal migration using the ‘doubly-robust' estimator that models both the treatment assignment and the outcome variable within the same framework....

This paper evaluates the effect of positive inducements on tax behavior by exploiting a natural experiment in which a municipality of Argentina randomly selected 400 individuals among more than 72,000 taxpayers who had complied with payment of their property tax. These individuals were publicly...

Most evaluations of public works programs in developing countries study their effects on poverty reduction and other labor market outcomes (job creation, earnings, and participation). However, very few look at other collateral effects, such as the incidence of violence. Between 2009 and 2014, El...

Are political activists preferentially targeted by politicians engaging in clientelistic transfers to bolster political support? We provide the first model to highlight two possible rationales for such transfers: to mobilize support from the activists themselves, or to mobilize support from...

Most research on labor market effects of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme focuses on outcomes at the district level. This paper shows that such a focus masks substantial spatial heterogeneity: treated villages located near untreated areas see smaller increases in...

Job analysis sits at the heart of all human resource practices, making it a critically important management activity in every organization. However, with increasing competition, shorter product life-cycles, rapid technological innovations, and the changing nature of organizational structures,...

Based on the literature on public procurement regulation, we use an Agent-Based Model to assess the performance of different selection procedures. Specifically, we aim at investigating whether and how the inclusion of reputation of firms in the public procurement selection process affects the...

To estimate demand for labor, we use a combination of detailed employment data and the outcomes of procurement auctions, and compare the employment of the winner of an auction with the employment of the second ranked firm (i.e. the runner-up firm). Assuming similar ex-ante winning probabilities...

Public works programs can be effective safety nets if they help allocate resources toward poor households. By setting wages lower than market rates public works programs identify poor households reasonably well. When these programs are oversubscribed and lack beneficiary selection rules however,...

Crime rates in Papua New Guinea's capital city of Port Moresby are among the highest in the world. Few youth work, and good jobs are scarce. In 2013, the National Capital District Commission partnered with the World Bank to implement the Urban Youth Employment Project. The project offers...

Ministry of Public Works and Transports is the public organization with the mission to implement new process, products, services and methods of delivery resulting in significant improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness or quality of outcomes. This research paper aimed at firstly...

Public works programs can be effective safety nets if they help allocate resources toward poor households. By setting wages lower than market rates public works programs identify poor households reasonably well. When these programs are oversubscribed and lack beneficiary selection rules however,...

Rural households in Ethiopia are exposed to a variety of covariate and idiosyncratic risks. In 2005, the Ethiopian government introduced the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) and in 2011 launched the Community Based Health Insurance Scheme (CBHI). This paper analyses the interaction between...

Crime rates in Papua New Guinea's capital city of Port Moresby are among the highest in the world. Few youth work, and good jobs are scarce. In 2013, the National Capital District Commission partnered with the World Bank to implement the Urban Youth Employment Project. The project offers...

This study investigates the consequences of poor implementation in public workfare programs, focusing on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in India. Using nationally representative data, we test empirically for a discouraged worker effect arising from either of...

Social safety nets are transfers targeted to the poor or vulnerable. They facilitate access to health and education services to build human capital. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (earlier known as Millennium Development Goals), national and state governments as well as...