Empowering Women through Public Policy: Can Gender-Sensitive Policy Reform to a Major Public Works Program Encourage Female Work and Improve Women's Wellbeing?

The proposed research project uses a randomized control trial design to test whether a gender-sensitive policy reform to India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) can encourage female participation and improve women’s socio-economic wellbeing. The policy reform proposes that all women have their NREGS wages deposited into individual bank accounts, instead of the status quo where wages are paid into a household bank account, typically owned by the male head. This reform has been proposed for India-wide rollout, but its impact on female welfare is theoretically ambiguous: the policy may improve women’s welfare if it increases women’s standing in the household or boosts financial empowerment. Alternatively, it could have unintended negative consequences such as increased domestic violence. The results from the field experiment will be used to estimate the net impact of this important policy change, and help Indian policymakers increase financial access for women in a gender-sensitive manner. Our primary outcomes of interest include a broad range of measures of female welfare and socioeconomic status, as well as measures of corruption and leakage within the NREGS system. The multi-treatment arm design of the research study will help provide evidence on the causal pathways that mediate the policy’s effect. Our design also includes a supplementary intervention designed to test whether additional training on how to use new banking technologies helps women benefit from these technologies.

In 2022 we will conduct a long-run follow up survey of participants in this study, the results of which will be studied in a stand alone research paper. See PAP section of this registry for additional details on this work.