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...

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 paper examines the short-term impacts of a labor-intensive public works program on household welfare and economic prospects. Using a community-level randomized control trial approach, the paper finds that the public works program targeted at youth in Sierra Leone successfully provided...

The aim of this paper is to provide an empirical test of the role of competition in procurement in reducing the effects of corruption. For this purpose, the paper examines whether competition is able to constrain the waste effects of corruption on the efficiency of execution of public works,...

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...

We exploit a new dataset based on EU procurement award notices to investigate the relationship between the degree of centralization of public procurement and its performance. We focus on the case of Italy, where all levels of government, along with a number of other public institutions, are...

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...