Determinants of Employment in India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme

Using household level data this paper provides systematic evidence on the employment impact of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in three Indian states: Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. We model this as a two stage Heckman procedure where we model selection for NREGS in the first phase and the determinants of hours worked in the second. A number of significant insights into the employment impact of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme are obtained