gender or household land endowments as individual or hosuehold characteristics ( _Xidt_ ) to explore potential heterogeneity of effects in these dimensions. Standard errors are clustered at household level throughout.

In all cases, availability of panel data allows us to use household fixed effects to control for unobservable effects that are time invariant. But households in control and treatment districts may follow different growth paths even in the absence of the intervention. To see if this is a concern, we use the 1982 data to test for pre-program parallel trends in variables of interest by estimating (1) for the 1982 to 1999 period (i.e. _t_ =0 for the 1982 and _t_ =1 for 1999/2000). Results for individuals’ main occupation, agricultural output value, and input use in table 1 suggest that, except non-farm self-employment where coefficients are marginally significant (though suggesting lower rather than higher growth in treatment areas), the hypothesis of preprogram parallel trends between treatment and control cannot be rejected.

To make initial inferences on potential transmission channels, we introduce MNREGS exposure as a productivity shifter in a standard Cobb-Douglas production function of the form _YMidt_ = _α0_ + _α1 MNREGSdt + α2 MNREGSdt X Postid + λ_ **_X_** _idt + μi + εidt_ (2) where, beyond the variables discussed earlier, _YMidt_ is monetary output by farm _i_ in _t_ , **_X_** _idt_ a vector of inputs _m_ used by _i_ , _μi_ a farm-specific fixed effect for farm _i,_ and _εidt_ a white noise error term, and the _α_ s and _λ_ are coefficients or coefficient vectors to be estimated. To ensure robustness of results, we estimate not only the panel regression with household fixed effects but also an equivalent cross sectional equation that includes villages with positive treatment only.

Moreover, for the subset of villages where such information is available, we replace the zero/one indicator of program availability ( _MNREGSdt_ ) with the number of days of total or irrigation-related MNREGS works in a village. As the share of the latter varies significantly across villages and effects of irrigation-related infrastructure would be felt more quickly than those of other types of local public goods (drought-proofing or land improvements), differences in estimated coefficients’ significance or magnitude between the two would indicate the relative importance of quick-maturing irrigation-related work: A figure for the latter much larger or more significant than that on total labor would suggest that water-related infrastructure built by MNREGS drives productivity effects while the opposite (i.e. the coefficient on total MNREGS-work being larger or more significant than that on water-related improvements) would point towards programinduced resource transfers as a the main transmission channel.

# **3.2 Descriptive statistics**

Table 2 presents data on key household and individual characteristics in 1999/00 and 2007/08 for treatment and control. Significant declines in household size, from 6.9 to 5.7 members on average, go hand in hand with increases in per capita income or consumption from 10,141 to 23,252 and 5,087 to 8,164 respectively 9