The recent enactment of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India has been widely hailed a policy that provides a safety net for the rural poor with the potential to boost rural income, stabilize agricultural production and reduce rural-urban migration. This paper, models the impact...

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in using public-works programs as anti-poverty measures in developing countries. This paper analyzes the rural labor market impacts of the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind, by using a...

We study the impact of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on children's educational outcomes via women's labour force participation. Using data from the Young Lives Study and taking advantage of the spatial and temporal variation in the intensity of implementation of the...

This paper investigates the effects of an income guarantee on borrowing to smooth consumption and finance cultivation in a risky setting with marked seasonality. A three-season, infinite-horizon theoretical model is developed and analyzed. The insights yielded by the model are then used to...

This paper examines how local politics affects public fund allocations. It uses the context of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in India which was introduced by the Indian National Congress (INC). Using longitudinal data on funds sanctioned and election results from three...

The evaluation of labor market policies has become an important issue in many European countries. In recent years, many of them have opened their administrative databases for evaluation studies. The advantages of administrative data are straightforward: they are accurate, contain a large number...

Canada's Youth Hires program was a targeted employment subsidy that rebated employment insurance premiums to employers with net increases in insurable earnings for youth aged 18-24. Using a difference-in-differences approach, in each of two datasets statistically and economically significant...

This paper provides robust estimates of the impact of both product and labour market regulations on unemployment using data for 24 European countries over the period 1998-2013. Controlling for country-fixed effects, endogeneity and a large set of covariates, results show that product market...

While there is evidence that return migration promotes entrepreneurship and self-employment of those who migrated, previous studies have not focused on whether migration provides the same benefits to individuals who did not migrate. Using a unique dataset that provides information on both...

In this paper, we examine the impact of reductions in barriers to migration on the consumption of households in rural China. We find that increased migration from rural villages leads to significant increases in consumption per capita, and that this effect is stronger for poorer households...