To motivate our analysis, we describe MNREGS characteristics and implementation arrangements, noting that it could affect socioeconomic outcomes directly, i.e. by project works enhancing productivity and returns to land and labor by the poor, or indirectly -by wage payments helping to smooth consumption and, if the program is expected to exist in the long term, providing implicit insurance and encouraging investment in physical and human capital. A brief review of methodological approaches and results suggests that most existing studies focused on impacts of wage-related resource transfers rather than effects on agricultural productivity and that consumption and production impacts have been analyzed largely in isolation from each other.

# **2.1 Program characteristics and potential impact pathways**

India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is one of the largest programs of its kind globally. Building on India’s long tradition of food-for-work schemes (Dutta _et al._ 2012; Subbarao 1997),<sup>1</sup> it guarantees employment of up to 100 days per year to households who registered locally to obtain a job card.<sup>2</sup> Unskilled labor made available in this way is used to build productive assets (access roads, water harvesting structures, etc.) in a way that explicitly encourages female participation by paying equal wages to men and women and by imposing a gender quota that requires that one-third of the work be performed by women. While overall responsibility for implementation is with states, many functions are delegated to the village/panchayat level.<sup>3</sup> A range of controls, including use of IT and social audits, were put in place to minimize abuse, adjust to wide variations in capacity across states, and ensure the program is implemented transparently.

The program’s legislative basis is the 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. A total of 200, 130, and 285 districts started to implement the program in February 2006, April 2007, and April 2008, respectively, with roll-out in three phases from the poorest to the least poor districts, based on a poverty index by India’s Planning Commission. To deal with issues arising from non-random expansion, three main strategies to assess program impact have been used in the literature, namely (i) difference in difference (DID) estimates, mostly at district level, that use data from NSS’s household surveys (possibly aggregated to form a pseudo-panel) or administrative data from other sources; (ii) regression discontinuity (RD) designs using the discontinuity in the Planning Commission index of poverty level in districts in a state that

> 1 The work requirement differentiates MNREGS from programs such as PROGRESA (Attanasio _et al._ 2012) or Bolsa Escola (Glewwe and Kassouf 2012) that focus more on education.

> 2 Applicants are eligible to receive a job card containing photos of all adult household members free within 15 days of application. Job-card holders’ indicative work demand lead to elaboration of an annual plan which, once ratified by the village assembly, is transmitted for consolidation at district level although in practice a more top-down process is often followed, based on central budget allocations.

> 3 Village governments ( _gram panchayats_ ) and their staff are responsible to match job seekers to jobs throughout the year. These include preparation of a list of projects in reasonable distance from the village, measures to ease female participation (e.g. child care), supervision of ongoing projects, worker identification and assignment to specific sites, and financial management including wage payment.

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