participation on attending village council meetings. For women without NREGS cards, we find that participation in _Mahila Samakhya_ significantly increases the ability to go out without permission. The positive effect on attending village council meetings is also significant at the 90 percent level. We thus find that _Mahila Samakhya_ improves the bargaining power of not only women who work, but also of those who do not have access to outside employment. This effect may come from a combination of increasing the woman’s reservation wage and increasing her information set about alternative choices. However, all but one of the first-stage F-statistics for these regressions are lower than 10, ranging from 7.27 to 8.54. The only exception is the physical mobility regression for women without NREGS cards, where the F-statistic is 11.75. While we might be concerned about weak instruments in this case, the Sargan test indicate that the instruments are exogenous.

Restricting the sample further to those women who do not work _and_ do not have NREGS cards, we have 73 observations in the physical mobility regression and 78 in the political participation regression. The first-stage F-statistic for the physical mobility regression is 8.23, but is only 6.33 for the political participation regression; as a result, we do not report the results from this regression. We find that program participation increases a woman’s ability to leave the house without permission; the associated t-statistic is 1.83, meaning that the estimate is significant at the 90 percent level. Although the sample is small and weak instruments are a concern, these results suggest that the indirect effect of _Mahila Samakhya_ , working through increased reservation wages and expanded information sets, can improve women’s physical mobility, and thereby empower them.

In summary, using PSM, 2SLS, and ITTs, we find that the _Mahila Samakhya_ program empowers women in a variety of ways, via both direct and indirect routes. In addition to directly increasing access to outside employment, political participation, and physical mobility, our results suggest the program generates significant spillovers that allow non-participants to benefit via greater access to outside employment. The program also empowers participants who do not work (and therefore only benefit from an increased reservation wage) to participate in village council meetings. Finally, we find that participants who do not have access to off-farm work still have greater physical mobility and political participation than untreated women.

# **8 Conclusion**

This paper uses primary data from the north Indian state of Uttarakhand to study the impact of a community-level rural women’s empowerment program called _Mahila Samakhya_ . _Mahila Samakhya_ aims to empower women through education and information, taking a grassroots approach to its implementation. We conceptually disentangle the effect of the program into a direct component that works through access to outside employment and an increased reservation wage, as well as an indirect component that works through information spillovers. This distinction between direct and indirect effects extends beyond the _Mahila Samakhya_ program to other programs operating at the community-level that may have spillover effects. We find evience that Mahila Samakhya both directly and indirectly succeeds in helping empower rural women.

Our empirical approach addresses two sources of potential bias. First, the program may be placed in villages and districts that are inherently different from those without the program, which might bias our estimates. Second, the characteristics of women who participate in the program may be different from those who choose not to participate, again, biasing our results. We first consider program placement, and find that the characteristics of the women are similar across treated and untreated districts. We further formally estimate bargaining power outcomes for non-participants in treated districts and their matched counterparts in untreated villages and find no significant 22