Effects of parents' participation in public work programs on children's health and education in select low- and middle-income countries

About This Grant

Abstract (30 lines): Public Work Programs (PWPs) are implemented in over 60 low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). They are designed to address the immediate needs arising from poverty by providing temporary cash-for-work opportunities to boost poor households’ incomes as well as provide new or improved infrastructure to local communities. There is growing evidence of the short-run impacts of PWPs on adult beneficiaries during program exposure and medium-run impacts when the PWPs are no longer available. However, there is surprisingly no experimental evidence on the impacts of PWPs on children living in beneficiary households at the time of exposure. The first part of the proposed project will leverage existing data on approximately 12,000 households from six large-scale public-works experiments conducted by the PI in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa regions to estimate the short-run impacts of households’ exposure to PWPs on household-level measures of children’s education and labor activities. The second part of the project will collect new data on physical health, cognitive and non-cognitive skills, labor activities, and time-use from all six sites to estimate the medium-run impacts of households’ exposures to PWPs during two important life-cycle stages: (a) early-childhood (i.e., those exposed to public works during in utero-5 years), and (b) school-ages (i.e., those exposed to public works between 6 and 14 years). The medium-run effects of PWPs are expected to vary between the early-childhood and school-age cohorts. For younger children, adults’ access to cash-for- work may facilitate important and timely investments in antenatal care and nutrition during sensitive periods of growth. It may attenuate the effects of early childhood nutritional deficiencies and improve children’s health and cognition in a permanent way. However, an increase in cash-for-work opportunities often reduces adults’ time at home and the family business. Importantly, for school-age children, the effect of PWPs can be ambiguous as the income and substitution effects of public-works impact children’s human capital in opposite ways. The income effect of public works encourages greater investments in health and schooling inputs. At the same time, the burden of substituting for parental and other adults’ activities at home and at work can reduce school- age children’s time in school, which may adversely affect their human-capital outcomes. This project will be the first to exploit experimental variation in access to public-works opportunities to estimate the short- and medium-run impacts of households’ exposures to PWPs during important childhood life-cycle stages on human capital and related outcomes.