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...

Business and politician interaction is pervasive but has mostly been analysed with a binary approach. Yet the network dimensions of such connections are ubiquitous. We use a unique dataset for seven economies that documents politically exposed persons (PEPs) and their links to companies,...

We study the implementation of Bolsa Familia, a program that conditions cash transfers to poor families on children's school attendance. Using unique administrative data, we analyze how beneficiaries respond to the enforcement of conditionality. Making use of random variation in the day on which...

The guide outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with ALMP's, and shows how to obtain rigorous impact estimates using two leading evaluation approaches. The most credible and straightforward evaluation method is a randomized design, in which a group of potential participants is...

Failure of participants to complete training programs is pervasive in existing active labor market programs both in developed and developing countries. The proportion of dropouts in prototypical programs ranges from 10 to 50 percent of all participants. From a policy perspective, it is of...

We assess the effectiveness of Job Corps (JC), the largest job training program targeting disadvantaged youth in the United States, by constructing nonparametric bounds for the average and quantile treatment effects of the program on wages. Our preferred estimates point toward convincing...

This paper investigates labor supply and redistributive effects of in-work benefits for Italian married couples using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and a multi-sectoral discrete choice model of labor supply. We consider two in-work benefit schemes following the key principles of the Earned...