General Equilibrium Effects of Increasing Women's Economic Engagement

Despite rising education levels, women’s labor force participation in India remains low. Understanding how scalable policy can increase women’s labor force participation, and assessing the downstream consequences of this change, is key to supporting women’s economic empowerment.  This study builds on research showing that increasing women’s control over income from India’s rural workfare program (MGNREGS) increased women’s work and liberalized norms (Field et al. 2021). While promising, that study only captured partial equilibrium effects, missing important channels for either amplifying positive impacts or catalyzing backlash.

The proposed study will address this gap by studying the economy-wide effects of a “big push” to increase women’s control over MGNREGS wages and access to MGNREGS work. Researchers will focus on economic outcomes including male and female employment, wages, prices, and local economic activity; they will also study the social consequences of this initiative, including women’s empowerment, gender norms, and downstream impacts on family planning.  

The randomized evaluation, conducted in collaboration with the Madhya Pradesh state government and the NGO PRADAN, will cover nearly one-third of the state, with women in treatment communities receiving support to receive direct wage payments and training on how to navigate local power structures to request work. This intervention is designed for scale and cost-effectiveness. Researchers will randomize community-level treatment intensity to identify general equilibrium and spillover effects.

By identifying the mechanisms through which labor market interventions reshape economic participation and social norms, the study will contribute to the literature on gender and labor market frictions in developing economies. Further, it will shed light on the extent to which at-scale efforts to increase women’s economic empowerment (without directly targeting family planning behavior) can influence family planning outcomes.