decision-making in the household.<sup>24</sup> The measures vary across countries and tend to be relatively narrow, and only three of the 9 point estimates document a positive increase (Lao PDR during the program, Egypt Community at one-month post-program, and Tunisia at 12 months). In Lao PDR, impacts were found on measures such as intra-household decisionmaking and community participation. The increase in women’s empowerment in Tunisia is driven by a large relative increase in the probability that women respondents have an income-generating activity. The Egypt Community study finds an increase in women’s control over household resources 1-month post-program, but this effect does not persist and there is a reduction (which is not statistically significant) in women’s control over household economic resources in the medium-run. In Comoros and Rural DRC, there is no evidence that the program had any effect on women’s empowerment. The Côte d’Ivoire program targeted youths, and impacts were much larger for women compared to men, but dedicated measures of empowerment were not collected. Overall, evidence shows that public works programs can improve women’s empowerment, but they do not do so systematically. While the uneven evidence may in part be due to limitations in measurement, open questions remain on how to design public works programs to achieve consistent improvements in this dimension.<sup>25</sup>

# **6.2 Psychological well-being**

Public works jobs can provide a sense of purpose and improve psychological well-being among participants, in particular for youth or otherwise underemployed populations. Eight of the 11 studies we review (or 12 of the 15 point estimates) analyze impacts on some form of psychological or subjective well-being measure. Given variations in these measures, we do not attempt to aggregate them. Still, four of the 12 point estimates, or three of the 11 studies (Tunisia, Egypt Infrastructure, and Côte d’Ivoire) find that the public works programs positively affected participants' psychological well-being. Individuals in the treatment group were significantly less likely to report distressing thoughts/memories, feel sad or depressed, or feel irritable as compared to those in the control group. Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire shows that effects on psychological well-being can persist beyond the shortrun, though there are signs of decay between short-run impacts (0.20 standard deviations) and medium-run impacts (0.11 standard deviations). Overall, results show that public works can improve psychological well-being, but these effects are not observed systematically, at least based on the measures available to date across studies.

> 24 The Rural and Urban DRC studies also measure views on women’s access to power and on gender-based violence and, in Comoros, the study measures women’s experiences of physical, emotional, or economic violence in their household. None of these studies, however, finds significant impacts on women’s empowerment. In a spin-off study in Lao PDR, no effect was found on gender-based violence (including no evidence of a backlash effect (Perova et al., 2021).

> 25 There is active research on the topic. For instance, Christian et al. (forthcoming) investigate whether public works can improve women’s empowerment when designed specifically to increase women’s access to earned income and use a much broader measure of women’s empowerment than the studies included in this paper.

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