We examine the labour market impacts of the largest livelihoods programs in the world, India’s Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM). A key aspect of this program is to mobilize rural women into self-help groups (SHGs). We combine administrative data on SHG membership across districts in India with survey micro-data on labour force and employment outcomes of rural women between 2011 and 2019. Using a generalized difference-in-differences approach, we find that SHG membership is positively associated with labour force participation and employment of rural women. We also find evidence that SHG membership is associated with a shift towards self-employment and a crowd-out of casual work among the employed. Our supplementary analysis based on large primary survey data from Maharashtra allows us to examine the relationship between SHG membership and economic activity at the individual level. The results confirm our main result of a positive association between SHG membership and economic activity. Further, we show that longer duration of SHG membership is associated with higher participation rates.

The Opportunity Zone program, created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, was designed to encourage investment in distressed communities across the U.S. We examine the early impacts (up to one-and-a-half years after enactment) of the Opportunity Zone program on residents of targeted areas. We leverage restricted-access microdata from the American Community Survey and employ a matching approach to estimate causal effects of Opportunity Zone designation. Our results point to little or no evidence of positive effects of the Opportunity Zone program on the employment, earnings, or poverty of zone residents.

We evaluate the effects of one of a new generation of economic development programs, the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), on local job creation. Incorporating perceived best practices from previous initiatives, the CCTC combines explicit eligibility thresholds with some discretion on the part of program officials to select tax credit recipients. The structure and implementation of the program facilitates rigorous evaluation. We exploit detailed data on accepted and rejected applicants to the CCTC, including information on the scoring of applicants with regard to program goals as well as on funding decisions, together with restricted-access American Community Survey (ACS) data on local economic conditions. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that each CCTC-incentivized job in a census tract increases the number of individuals working in that tract by close to 3 – a significant local multiplier. Local multipliers are larger for non-manufacturing awards than for manufacturing awards. CCTC awards increase employment among workers across socioeconomic groups and in more- as well as less-advantaged neighborhoods, but have limited impact on residents of affected communities. We validate our empirical strategy and confirm our core results using an alternative dataset and recently developed difference-in-differences methods that correct for potential biases generated by variation in treatment timing and treatment effect heterogeneity.

The “strength of weak ties” has been established in the context of labour market outcomes, with theoretical and empirical investigation showing how weak ties lead to an increase in mobility and job opportunities. The impact of weak ties on community organisation is less well understood. We contribute to this literature by investigating if weak ties, generated via membership of livelihood programmes, can lead to the creation or enhancement of social capital. Based on data from one of the largest independent primary surveys for India, we find that participation in self-help groups had little impact on livelihoods, but led to the creation of significant social capital, as measured by indicators related to personal efficacy and collective action. We use Entropy Balancing to estimate mean effects to tackle the problem of non-random selection into the programme. In contrast to the bulk of existing evidence on livelihood programmes that is based on small samples, our large sample size and innovative survey design allow us to detect a larger number of effects with greater certainty. We argue that the social capital generated by the programme is a significant positive impact (even though the main target of the programme is to strengthen livelihoods), as it strengthens the process of women’s empowerment.

We estimated the degree of gender discrimination in Sweden across occupations using a correspondence study design. Our analysis of employer responses to more than 3,200 fictitious job applications across 15 occupations revealed that overall positive employer response rates were higher for women than men by almost 5 percentage points. We found that this gap was driven by employer responses in female-dominated occupations. Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.

Micro, small, and medium enterprises contribute a third of India’s gross domestic product and provide employment to over 110 million workers. Using a mixed methods design to ascertain the level of sectoral distress at the peak of the nationwide lockdown in May 2020, we found production falling from an average of 75% of capacity to just 13%. On an average, firms retained only 44% of their workforce, and 69% of firms reported inability to survive longer than three months. Distress measures were more severe for smaller firms by employment size.

Motivated by recently passed laws in the United States banning inquiries about salary history, this experiment examines the impact of information about a player’s outside option in bargaining. The policy intention is studied by comparing private information to perfect information. Since the laws do not prevent voluntary revelation of salaries, a third treatment examines the impact of adding a truthful revelation choice by the informed party. I find that the signaling value of revelation decisions undermines the benefits of private information. A fourth treatment allows for outside options to be misrepresented. Overall, results suggest that these laws may not work as well as intended.

We use nationally representative data from the Employment–Unemployment Surveys in 1999–2000 and 2009–10 to explore gender wage gaps among Regular Wage/Salaried (RWS) workers in India, both at the mean, as well as along the entire wage distribution to see “what happens where”. The gender log wage gap at the mean is 55% in 1999–2000 and 49% in 2009–10, but this change is not statistically significant. The Blinder–Oaxaca and the Machado–Mata–Melly decompositions indicate that, in both years, the bulk of the gender wage gap is unexplained, i.e., possibly discriminatory. They also reveal that over the decade, while the wage-earning characteristics of women improved relative to men, the discriminatory component of the gender wage gap also increased. In fact, in 2009–10, if women were “paid like men”, they would have earned more than men on account of their characteristics. In both years, we see the existence of the “sticky floor”, in that gender wage gaps are higher among low-wage earners and lower for high-wage earners. Over the ten-year period, we find that the sticky floor became “stickier” for RWS women. Machado–Mata–Melly decompositions reveal that, in both years, women at the lower end of the wage distribution face higher discriminatory gaps compared to women at the upper end.

We analyze the changes in earnings of paid workers (wage earners) in rural India from 2004/05 to 2011/12. Real earnings increased at all percentiles, and the percentage increase was larger at the lower end. Consequently, earnings inequality declined. Recentered influence function decompositions show that throughout the earnings distribution, except at the very top, both changes in “worker characteristics” and in “returns to these characteristics” increased earnings, with the latter having played a bigger role. Decompositions of inequality measures reveal that although the change in characteristics had an inequality-increasing effect, chiefly attributable to increased education levels, inequality declined because workers at lower quantiles experienced greater improvements in returns to their characteristics than those at the top.