Do Workfare Programs Live Up to Their Promises? Experimental Evidence from Cote D’Ivoire

Abstract

Gallen and the World Bank for useful comments and suggestions. Computational reproducibility has been verified by DIME analytics. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions of the paper are those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent, nor those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Targeting Impact Versus Deprivation

“…The issue here appears to be analogous to that identified byAbadie et al (2018), who document a bias in conventional approaches to studying impact heterogeneity towards negative estimates of the relationship between impact and untreated outcomes. In contrast, our approach yields positive estimates.6 Other recent work examining heterogenous treatment effects of anti-poverty programs using ML methods includesMcKenzie and Sansone (2019), who finds limited additional benefits from using machine learning methods over and above the predictive power of a few key covariates in predicting entrepreneurial success in Nigeria;Hussam et al (2020), who examine treatment effects forecasts obtained via machine learning as a benchmark for those elicited from community members; andBertrand et al (2021), who employ ML and other approaches to evaluate how to improve the targeting of workfare programs in Ivory Coast.…”

General Equilibrium Effects of (Improving) Public Employment Programs: Experimental Evidence From India

“…It is also a subtle one, as the gains participants obtain directly from program earnings themselves (which are relatively easy to observe) may be attenuated or amplified by partial and general equilibrium (GE) effects. For instance, gross program earnings may overstate net income gains for the poor to the extent that they substitute out of private employment (Bertrand, Crepon, Marguerie, and Premand ( 2021 )), or understate them to the extent that market wages increase, with the magnitude of these effects depending in turn on labor market structure. Answering this question requires credible identification of impacts at scales large enough to move markets, accounting for the spatial spillovers this may involve, and measuring income from various sources comprehensively.…”

The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp

“…There exists a long history of sociological work exploring the costs of long-term unemployment beyond that of income alone (Morse and Weiss, 1955;Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel, 1971). Conversely, a burgeoning experimental literature documents positive psychosocial impacts of employment, but is not designed to distinguish pecuniary from non-pecuniary channels (Bertrand et al, 2021). Our experiment is motivated by this literature as well as a limited stock of empirical evidence from lab-in-the-field experiments around the costs of idle time (Bhanot, Han, and Jang, 2018;Hsee, Yang, and Wang, 2010).…”