Insufficient attention has been paid to understanding what determines the performance of health workers and how they make labor market choices. This paper reports on findings from focus group discussions with both health workers and users of health services in Ethiopia, a country with some of...

Embezzlement of resources is hampering public service delivery throughout the developing world. Research on this issue is hindered by problems of measurement. To overcome these problems we use an economic experiment to investigate the determinants of corrupt behaviour. We focus on three aspects...

In Mozambique, easily treatable diseases such as malaria, diarrhea, and respiratory infections contribute to a heavy burden of disease. Notwithstanding efforts by the Mozambican government to promote access to health care, many who could benefit from simple cost-effective health care services do...

Utilization of health services are an important policy concern in most developing countries, reflecting both efforts to improve health outcomes and to meet international obligations to make health services broadly accessible. Although many policy and research initiatives have focused on the need...

In recent years, a large body of empirical work has focused on measuring and explaining socioeconomic inequalities in health outcomes and health service use. In any effort to address these questions, analysts must confront the issue of how to measure socioeconomic status. In developing...

Important gaps remain in the understanding of the economic consequences of civil war. Focusing on the conflict in Rwanda in the early 90s, and using micro data to carry out econometric analysis, this paper finds that households and localities that experienced more intense conflict are lagging...

Although it is a common theoretical assumption that the chances to find a job fall with time in unemployment, this is not systematically confirmed by empirical evidence, and there is no evidence for developing countries. We develop a framework that allows us to test the four major explanations...

Most developing countries face important challenges regarding both the quality and quantity of health care they provide and there is a growing consensus that health workers play an important role in this. Although contemporary analysis of development emphasizes the central role of institutions,...

Background: Most developing countries face shortages of health workers in rural areas. This has profound consequences for health service delivery, and ultimately for health outcomes. To design policies that rectify these geographic imbalances it is vital to understand what factors determine...

Economists have traditionally assumed that individual behavior is motivated exclusively by extrinsic incentives. Social psychologists, in contrast, stress that intrinsic motivations are also important. In recent work, economic theorists have started to build psychological factors, like intrinsic...