This paper analyzes the impact of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on households. In particular, we study the impact of the program on food security, savings and health outcomes of households. We follow 1064 households from 198 villages of Medak, Andhra Pradesh, over...

Public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor people's agency and...