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

The Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs’ Trade, Development and Political Economy Series presents Karthik Muralidharan. 

Public employment programs may affect poverty both directly through the income they provide and indirectly through general-equilibrium effects. The authors estimate both effects, exploiting a reform that improved the implementation of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and whose rollout was randomized at a large (sub-district) scale.

Karthik Muralidharan is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Board member and co-chair of the Education program at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. Prof. Muralidharan’s primary research topics include education, health, and social protection; measuring quality of public service delivery; program evaluation; and improving the effectiveness of public spending (with a focus on developing countries). His work has been published in top journals.