Did the nationwide implementation of electronic fund management in the Indian employment guarantee scheme result in reduced expenditures? A re‐examination of the evidence

Digital tools are increasingly being used in welfare programmes to reduce corruption and increase transparency. Banerjee et al. (2020, E‐governance, accountability, and leakage in public programmes: experimental evidence from a financial management reform in India. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20180302) evaluate the effectiveness of one such intervention. In a later section of their paper, they use a Two‐Way Fixed Effects (TWFE) specification to examine the consequences of the nationwide scale of an electronic funds management system in India's workfare programme, and report that it reduced expenditures by 19%. The present paper extends its analysis by (a) exploiting the recent literature that disaggregates the TWFE coefficient in the presence of staggered treatment timing to pinpoint sources of identifying variation and (b) attempting to uncover heterogeneity in treatment effects. We find that certain problematic comparisons have a large weight in the TWFE coefficient. Further, an event study analysis of the six constituent and valid comparisons shows that there is no support for parallel trends, so lag coefficients cannot be vested with causal interpretation. Our results imply that large‐scale evaluations, because of the very diversity they encompass, need to explicitly account for the factors that are responsible for programme effectiveness.