are more likely to be based in district centers, are more likely to be more sought after (and hence oversubscribed), and are more likely be run by high-capacity T&E providers.<sup>29,30</sup> Second, selected trainees could differ in characteristics, other than being offered training, from non-trainees, since T&E providers purposely interview and select the applicants they think will perform best. We mitigate this bias by selecting our study participants within a narrow range of each event’s threshold score, which we hypothesize will limit the differences between the treatment and control groups. We examine this hypothesis further in section V.

The sampling procedures described above resulted in a study population of 4677 over all three cohorts. For the pooled sample ( _i.e.,_ 2010 through 2012 cohorts), the study population is about 64 percent female and on average 24.5 years old. Fifty-eight percent are married while 51 percent have at least one child. Approximately 59 percent of the sample has engaged in any income-generating activity in the month prior to the survey, a figure which may seem high, but includes those who are working without pay on their own household farms. When we restrict to non-farm income-generating activities, the employment rate falls to 27 percent. At baseline, the average earnings of the pooled sample were 1272 NRs per month (equivalent to about 17 USD). This figure may seem low, since it represents the average earnings over the entire study population of 4677 individuals, including those with zero earnings. Only 17 percent of the 2010-2012 pooled sample earned more than 3000 NRs per month, a level deemed to represent “gainful” employment. Interestingly, about 15 percent of the sample was already engaged in the same trade for which training they applied (denoted as “trade-specific IGA”), indicating that a significant minority of applicants were looking to upgrade their existing skills. Though they are not older than the men in the sample, women are more likely to be married and have a child, and have lower employment and earnings at baseline.<sup>31</sup> As discussed in Section II, the EF provides financial incentives for T&E providers to recruit and train people from the Dalit and Janajati ethnic groups. For Janajatis, the T&E providers appear to respond to these incentives, as 44 percent of the applicants are Janajatis, and they are statistically more likely to be in the treatment group than control.<sup>32</sup> The T&E providers appear to have less success with attracting Dalit applicants: only 8 percent of the applicants are Dalits (a bit less than the population average), and they are equally divided between the treatment and control groups.

# **b. Estimating the EF Training Program Effects**

To estimate causal effects of the EF training program on various outcomes, first we employ a “difference in difference” (DID) technique. We will refer to this as the OLS specification in the remainder of this report. The main equation we estimate is:

> 29 The survey team deployed a fixed number of staff to each district center, with a schedule of all events in that district. Events conducted by high-capacity T&E providers and in popular trades were more likely to keep to their scheduled start date. Because the T&E providers were not required to wait more than 5 days between the interviews and the start of training, and the unpredictability of the interview dates, it was impossible for the survey team to reach all of the events with enough time to conduct the baseline survey.

> 30 If these characteristics also determine the quality of the training, this non-random sampling of events may bias our estimates upward and overstate the true impact of the program. One mitigating factor is that in every cohort our sample includes a high fraction of the T&E providers contracted by EF.

> 31 More details about the characteristics of the study population are found in a separate baseline report, available upon request from the authors.

> 32 For reference, the 2001 census indicated that Janajatis made up 37% and Dalits made up 13% of the total Nepali population.

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