IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/22499.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Analyzing the Impact of the World’s Largest Public Works Project on Crime

Author

Listed:
  • Satadru Das
  • Naci Mocan

Abstract

India started the implementation of a rural public works program in 2006, covering all districts of the country within three years. The program quarantees 100 days of employment per year at minimum wage to each rural household on demand, with the goal of reducing joblessness and poverty. We exploit the design and implementation of this program to investigate its employment impact on various types of crimes, ranging from burglary to kidnapping to riots. We show that the program acts as an insurance scheme because an increase in rainfall, which is negatively correlated with agricultural production, lowers the demand for jobs under the program. Controlling for rainfall, we find that employment generated by the program has a negative impact on both property and violent crime. Although crime elasticities with respect to employment are small, this finding represents another dimension of the social benefit generated by the program.

Suggested Citation

  • Satadru Das & Naci Mocan, 2016. "Analyzing the Impact of the World’s Largest Public Works Project on Crime," NBER Working Papers 22499, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22499
    Note: EH LE LS PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22499.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rodriguez, Zachary, 2022. "The power of employment: Effects of India’s employment guarantee on women empowerment," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    2. Cody Tuttle, 2019. "Snapping Back: Food Stamp Bans and Criminal Recidivism," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 11(2), pages 301-327, May.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H0 - Public Economics - - General
    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • J08 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics Policies
    • J43 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Agricultural Labor Markets
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22499. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.