A substantial body of research investigates the design of incentives in firms, yet less is known about incentives in organizations that hire individuals to perform tasks with positive social spillovers. We conduct a field experiment in which agents hired by a public health organization are...

In much of the developing world, many farmers grow crops for local or personal consumption despite export options which appear to be more profitable. Thus many conjecture that one or several markets are missing. We report here on a randomized controlled trial conducted by DrumNet in Kenya that...

Female 'empowerment' has increasingly become a policy goal, both as an end to itself and as a means to achieving other development goals. Microfinance in particular has often been argued, but not without controversy, to be a tool for empowering women. Here, using a randomized controlled trial,...

We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of...

We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm's overall performance, we explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength...

We document the establishment and evolution of a cooperative norm among workers using evidence from a natural field experiment on a leading UK farm. Workers are paid according to a relative incentive scheme under which increasing individual effort raises a worker's own pay but imposes a negative...

In a world with asymmetric information, contractual terms are an important incentive device. This Paper studies the effect of crop characteristics on the choice between short-term and long-term tenancy contracts and on the choice between sharecropping and fixed-rent contracts when the production...

This Paper analyses an unusually conservative type of redistribution. We take land from the very rich, as usual, but give it to the rich instead of the poor. We show that this type of reform reduces agency costs, thus increasing productivity, total surplus in the economy, and workers’ welfare....

We discuss how the use of field experiments sheds light on long standing research questions relating to firm behavior. We present insights from two classes of experiments: within and across firms, and draw common lessons from both sets. Field experiments within firms generally aim to shed light...

This paper analyzes whether political outcomes in local democracies are determined by the preferences of the median -typically poor- agents or whether they reflect the wishes of the wealthy elites. A model shows that when politicians belonging to different groups can form coalitions, the wealthy...