presence of other household members also plays a role in the option to delegate the offer. Just over half of the women (56 percent) have no other household members aged 15 years or older apart from their husbands. Another 14 percent have a husband and at least one child aged 15-19 years. The remaining 30 percent of female beneficiaries have a husband and one other adult aged 20 years or older (e.g., an adult child, sibling, parent, niece/nephew, or other relative) in their household.

When the female beneficiaries delegate their offer, they do so primarily to other women: 63 percent of delegees were woman. Among the women who delegate the offer, just over 25 percent do so due to ineligibility—they are either in their last trimester of pregnancy or had newborn under 40 days old); 15 percent delegate due to illness at the time they received the offer.<sup>18</sup> The remaining reason why women delegate their offer is because they needed to care for another household member: 32 percent delegate due to childcare constraints and 11 percent due to caring for a sick household member. For the remaining 15 percent of delegations, the original female beneficiaries do not report a specific reason. Whenever a female beneficiary delegates her offer to someone outside the household, then the delegees has to agree to share the earnings with the original female beneficiary.

With near universal take-up, we cannot assess to what extent socio-economic status influenced program take-up. We do notice, however, that women in relatively wealthier households are more likely to delegate the public works opportunity. In fact, the share of women in the highest asset index quintile who delegate is double that in the lowest quintile.

# **5.2. Labor supply response**

Table 4 presents the impact that the public works offer has on employment outcomes for three demographic groups within the household: (a) the female beneficiary (self-reported); (b) all remaining adult household members, including the husband (reported by the female beneficiary); and (c) the husband (self-reported). Figure 2 shows graphically a subset of the employment measures. Employment status at midline and at endline was computed based on data collected via the weekly surveys described above.

We find that the contemporaneous labor supply effect on women’s employment is substantial and corresponds with the high take-up discussed earlier. Female participation in public works results in a 54.5 percentage-point increase in female employment, which subsequently increases general employment from 21.3 to 75.8 percent.<sup>19</sup> There is evidence that public works has a crowding-out effect among a small share of the self-employed women who appear to cease self-employment activities and, thereby, reduce their self-employment from 16 to 6 percent. This same effect has been found in other studies on public works, which

> 18 We collected the beneficiaries’ reasons for delegating the offer only in rounds 3 and 4. Consequently, the distribution of the reported reasons is based on only half of the treatment sample. 19 The public works reported in Table 4 at midline and endline are almost entirely part of the government’s emergency social assistance program as almost no other public works programs were being implemented in Djibouti during this period.

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