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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on farm sector wage rate. This identification strategy rests on the assumption that all districts across India would have had similar wage trends in the absence of the program. The author argues that this assumption may not be true due to non-random allocation of districts to the program’s three phases across states and different economic growth paths of the states post the implementation of NREGS.

To control for overall macroeconomic trends, the author allows for state-level time fixed effects to capture the differences in growth trajectories across districts due to changing economic landscape in the parent-state over time. The author also estimates the expected farm sector wage growth due to the increased public work employment provision using a theoretical model.

The results, contrary to the existing studies, do not find support for a significantly positive impact of NREGS treatment on private cultivation wage rate. The theoretical model also shows that an increase in public employment work days explains very little of the total growth in cultivation wage post 2004.

This paper looks specifically at farm sector wage growth and the possible impact of NREGS on it, accounting for state specific factors in shaping farm wages. Theoretical estimates are presented to overcome econometric limitations.

The long-debated impact of right-to-work (RTW) laws took on more urgency with the passage of RTW in additional states in the twenty-first century. The impact of RTW on shareholder wealth of corporations located in four states is evaluated here: Oklahoma (2000), Indiana (2012), Michigan (2012), and Wisconsin (2015). Event study results show that RTW had a positive effect on shareholder wealth in these states, albeit an effect that was lower in Michigan than elsewhere. We argue that this is indirect evidence in support of research indicating that RTW hinders union organizing, raises profits, and reduces nonunion employee compensation.

This paper assesses the efficacy of the 18 small business development centers (SBDCs) located throughout the state of Pennsylvania during 2013–2016 as a proxy for publicly funded, small business consulting services in general.

The paper compares the sales growth of SBDC clients, as reported in postconsultation surveys, to comparable growth measures for the corresponding business population using one- and two-sample t-tests.

The results show that respondent clients with existing businesses clearly outperform the broader population following consultation, both in aggregate and when decomposed by region and industry.

Although the best available data, the results are tempered by low response rates and self-reporting.

The paper empirically demonstrates that SBDC clients experience higher growth in sales and employment following their consultation than the broader business population. The net benefit of such services is, however, impossible to determine.

Over the past three decades, the U.S. economy experienced a sharp increase in the labor-force participation of women, causing a similar increase in the demand for non-parental child care. Concurrent with these developments has been a dramatic rise in the prevalence of childhood obesity, prompting the question as to what extent the increase in child-care utilization is responsible for the growth in obesity. This chapter examines the impact of various child-care arrangements on school-age children's weight outcomes using panel data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). An advantage of the ECLS-K for our purposes is that it tracks children's child-care arrangements between Kindergarten and the 5th grade. Our fixed-effects' results suggest that non-parental child-care arrangements are not strongly associated with children's weight outcomes. Our findings are robust to numerous sensitivity and subgroup analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether entrepreneurship is a significant factor in explaining economic growth at the state level.

This paper, unlike previous work, uses the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (KIEA) as the measure of entrepreneurial activity. Based on standard growth regressions using real per capita gross state product, real per capita personal income and employment growth, we test for the independent role that entrepreneurial activity may have on state economic growth.

We find that an increase in the level of entrepreneurial activity is robustly associated with an increase in economic growth. Such findings reinforce calls for policy changes at the state level that promote more productive entrepreneurship.

These conclusions are tentative. The findings are based on the growth of the 50 states over a relatively short period. A longer data set would be preferable, if data were available. Moreover, the author has not attempted to distinguish between different categories of entrepreneurship, for example productive and unproductive entrepreneurship.

Such findings reinforce calls for policy changes at the state level that promote more productive entrepreneurship. This would include, among others, changes such as reducing or eliminating state income taxes and setting strict limits on the government's use of eminent domain and environmental property takings.

The study uses the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (KIEA), arguably a superior measure of state‐level entrepreneurial activity, to explain state economic growth. The topic is timely and the results have important policy implications.

This paper examines the conditions under which states include sexual orientation as a protected status in hate crime policy over the course of 25 years. Previous research in this area has generally focused on the passage of either general hate crime statutes longitudinally or the inclusion of sexual orientation in hate crime legislation via cross-sectional analysis. Moreover, previous work in this area tends to concentrate on two types of factors affecting policy passage: (1) structural factors such as social disorganization and economic vitality, and (2) political characteristics including governor’s political party and the makeup of the state legislature. We argue that a strong LGBT social movement organizational presence may also influence LGBT hate crime policy passage. Using an event history analysis, we test how state-level social movement organizational mobilization, as well as the state-level political context, affect policy passage from 1983 to 2008. Our findings indicate that political opportunities, including political instability and government ideology, matter for the passage of anti-gay hate crime policy. We also find evidence to support political mediation, as the interaction between social movement organizational presence and Democrats in the state legislature affect policy passage.

Employing data on 14 major Indian states during 1973‐2004, this paper aims to investigate the hypothesis that economic growth is affected by financial outreach.

The paper employs univariate tests as well as advanced panel regression techniques to examine whether financial outreach matters for state‐level economic growth.

The analysis suggests that improvements in financial outreach led to a perceptible rise in per capita growth. In terms of magnitudes, a rise in demographic outreach by 10 percent raises state per capita growth by 0.3 percent; in case of geographic outreach, the increase is lower. Finally, the analysis supports the hypotheses that states with higher manufacturing share tend to grow faster and the quality of state‐level institutions and infrastructure exert a significant bearing on growth.

Although the definitions of financial outreach are based on international best practice, they focus only on banks and are driven by the availability of data on relevant variables.

The article belongs to the broad strand of literature which examines the finance‐growth nexus.

Financial outreach is presently an avowed objective of policymakers, both in India and elsewhere. The article examines which sets of economic/policy variables impact financial outreach. The analysis can provide policymakers with feedback as regards the feasibility of the strategies pursued to improve financial outreach and thereby, how best to redesign and fine‐tune them.

To the author's knowledge, this is presumably the first study in India to examine the financial outreach‐growth nexus in a systematic manner at the sub‐national level.

While many states have adopted renewable portfolio standards (RPS), they have employed agencies with very different missions to manage these programs. These organizational differences are important in understanding how agencies are approaching the policy implementation. However, there is little research on the comparative effectiveness of these implementation approaches. This article begins with a background of RPS programs, and presents a typology of RPS implementation agencies. The effectiveness of RPS implementation approaches is tested with a pooled state-level dataset covering 14 years of program adoption and implementation. The results indicate implementation approach is substantively important in explaining policy outcomes and the growth of renewable energy. More specifically, the findings suggest using an economic development approach is the most effective way of producing growth in renewable energy generation.

Most criminal justice scholars agree that the past three decades have witnessed a punitive shift in criminal justice policy, public opinion, and political rhetoric. Have these political trends also left their mark on policy approaches to due process rights? The provision of counsel to indigent defendants is a signature issue in debates over due process rights. The Supreme Court expanded dramatically the circumstances under which states were required to provide counsel in the 1960s and 1970s, though decisions about the implementation of this mandate were left to individual states. We examine the evolution of indigent defense policy, at the state and local level, over the past three decades, and ask two questions: First, did policies evolve in the directions expected by reform advocates? Second, to the extent that policies developed differently across states, how can we account for those differences? We find that refomers' optimistic projections about structure and funding have not been realized, and that adoption of progressive policies has been uneven across states. Most importantly, we find evidence that the politics of ideology and racial conflict have played a significant role in states' indigent defense policy over the past three decades.