We develop a new theory of employee referrals into informal low - and unskilled jobs in developing country labour markets. Employers use social preferences between referees and new recruits to mitigate moral hazard problems in the workplace. We show that employers prefer to hire workers with...

The current shortage of health workers in many low-income countries poses a threat to the quality of health services. When the number of patients per health worker grows sufficiently high, there will be insufficient time to diagnose and treat all patients adequately. This paper tests the...

The anti-corruption reform in the Tanzanian tax bureaucracy in the mid-1990s was apparently a short-lived success. In the wake of the reform, a number of "tax experts" established themselves in the market, many of them being laid off tax bureaucrats. We argue that middle-men can undermine the...

A number of low- and middle-income countries have a severe shortage of health workers. This paper studies how health workers' choices of labour supply and work effort impact on the quality of health services when health workers are in short supply. We analyse how policy measures such as monetary...

We study how local connections to persons in influential positions affect access to lucrative international migrant jobs and attractive government employment. In rural Nepal, it would not be surprising if social status, captured by a household’s caste but also by wealth or education, strongly...