on interventions targeted at the individual. Only a small number of papers look at community-level interventions. For instance, Imai and Eklund (2008) use survey data on a women’s communitybased organization in rural Papua New Guinea to assess the effectiveness of autonomous women’s groups compared to those that receive external support. Their analysis— using a Heckman Selection Model as well as Propensity Score Matching— shows that the autonomous groups are more effective in improving child welfare. Thus, community-level interventions targeted at women can generate significant benefits to children’s well-being.

One of the few analyses of _Mahila Samakhya_ uses data from the state of Bihar to evaluate the program’s effect on community-level trust and social capital (Janssens, 2010). The paper uses Propensity Score Matching to calculate Intent-to-Treat estimates of the program. Matching women from treated villages to those from untreated villages, results suggest that the program significantly increases trust and engenders social capital. Participants are more likely to contribute to local educational and infrastructural community projects. Significant spillovers also exist with nonparticipants; non-participant households in program villages exhibit higher levels of trust and are more likely to engage in community building activities than households in non-program villages.

Other work examines allied aspects of the program without explicitly evaluating it: Kandpal and Baylis (2013) ask whether participation affects the diversity of participants’ peer group, while Kandpal and Baylis (2011) examine whether friends’ participation improves female bargaining power and child welfare outcomes. None of these studies considers the causal model behind the mechanisms of community-level interventions. Next, we present a model that decomposes the effect of program participation in a community-level intervention.

# **4 Decomposing the Effect of Program Participation**

Participation in _Mahila Samakhya_ can have a direct effect by improving a woman’s job prospects, and an indirect effect that changes perceived social norms through information spillovers. We attempt to decompose the effect of participation in _Mahila Samakhya_ into these two effects. Participation in the program directly increases the woman’s educational attainment, which in turn improves her job prospects (Phipps and Burton, 1998), potentially leading her to find employment outside her home. Further, even a participant who does not work may benefit directly from the education because when bargaining with her husband over household resources, knowing about better job opportunities and having more marketable skills increase her disagreement utility.<sup>4</sup> The direct effect of the program thus works through employability, skills, and reservation wages, which in turn affect bargaining power through outside options. The education gained through this program is therefore expected to raise bargaining power. By contrast, the indirect effect works by expanding the woman’s information set about alternatives, and therefore affecting her perceived social norms.

Following Montgomery and Casterline (1996), we can think of a woman facing an optimization problem in which she chooses a course of action _c_ in order to maximize her expected utility. Let the set _{c_ 1 _, . . . , cN }_ represent the universe of choices that a woman could potentially make, and let _{c_ 1 _, . . . , cK}_ , where _K ≤ N_ , represent the subset of choices that the woman is aware of as being available to her. The choice that the woman makes as a result of her household bargain leads to one of several possible outcomes, indexed by the variable _j_ , where each outcome is associated with a

> 4The disagreement utility is each spouse’s intertemporal utility if they remained single or if they were noncooperating in marriage, and depends on the spouse’s own earning potential and the partner’s earning potential as well as on the non-cooperative equilibrium outcome of investment in children.

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