Employment Guarantee Schemes and Wages in India

Girish Bahal

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: Using a novel data-set of district-wise program expenditure, we estimate the impact of large employment schemes on agricultural wages in India. Depending on the underlying theoretical mechanism, private wages can either respond to contemporaneous fluctuations in program expenditure or be sensitive to the stock of expenditure incurred under such programs. We first find that although program expenditure varied substantially both across and within districts, every district was covered under employment guarantee during the 2001-2010 period. Next, we empirically contrast the “spot” versus the “stock” effect of employment schemes on wages. Identification of program impact is achieved by partialling out a host of district and year specific controls. Exploiting the fund allocation process of these schemes, we further check for potentially endogenous district-year fluctuations. We find a significant positive impact on wages through the stock effect. In contrast, we do not find an immediate jump in wages suggesting weak spot effects.

Keywords: Public works; Workfare; NREGA; Public capital; Wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H53 I38 J31 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-04-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-pbe
Note: gnb25
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pub ... pe-pdfs/cwpe1626.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:1626

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().