income gains, consuming only a small share. Among participating households, we also find a 9 percent increase in per capita expenditure and a 12 percent increase in per capita food expenditure. The consumption gains are reflected in modest improvements in food diversity for young children at midline, suggesting that the program enables some mothers to act on the nutrition education that they receive during their local nutrition and health sessions.

Fifth, most of the women who accept the public works offer report maintaining control over their earnings. Only a small portion of women give their earnings to their husbands. Drawing on our unique and intensive intra-household transfers weekly survey data, we also show that the transfers that husbands make to their participating wives to manage household expenditures are substantial and remain unaffected.

Finally, we do not find that program participants sustain labor market attachment after the short-term income opportunity. Although the intervention substantially increases women’s employment for its duration and, thereby, might act as an incentive to future employment, we find that the program has neither a positive effect on women’s employment nor an impact on their willingness to search for a job or start a self-employment in the near future. However, we do observe a marginal improvement in women’s decision-making power, which we proxied by women’s self-reported perceived participation in household decisions, 9 months after the program ended.

Beyond the average effects, an important angle that we studied is whether specific subgroups benefit the most (or the least) from the intervention. To this end, we use machine learning methods to test for the extent of such heterogeneity. We find that women who were employed at baseline (and thus with a potentially higher opportunity cost for their time) are less likely to benefit from the program. The bulk of employment at baseline is accounted for by women engaged in self-employment activities who were marginally poorer than women with no employment, conditional on both having very low literacy rates.

Interestingly, the heterogeneity analysis also shows that women with more mobility constraints at baseline are least likely to take up the employment offer, although they still accept the public works offer, with one-third of the women being employed. This suggests that social norms are partially binding and that they mediate the labor supply response. We observe the drop-off in employment at endline across the board, with no detected heterogeneity after the program ended.

Our results speak to the broad literature on public works inspired by the seminal and pioneering work of Martin Ravallion (1990, 1991, and 1999) and the role of public works in poverty reduction and income stabilization. The direct effects on participating households hinge on determining a wage rate that screens for the beneficiaries who needed the program the most. Women, on average, generally have lower opportunity costs/potential foregone income and, thus, stand to gain relatively more. Other public works programs have documented larger income gains for women in Argentina (Jalan & Ravallion, 2003; Galasso 4