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...

This paper investigates an alternative proxy for individual worker productivity in physical work settings: a direct measure of physical activity using an accelerometer. First, the paper compares worker labor outcomes, such as labor supply and daily productivity obtained from firm personnel data,...

This paper reports on a two-tiered experiment designed to separately identify the selection and effort margins of pay-for-performance (P4P). At the recruitment stage, teacher labor markets were randomly assigned to a pay- for-percentile or fixed-wage contract. Once recruits were placed, an...

This paper investigates whether aspirations matter for education, which offers a common route out of poverty. We find that mother aspirations are strongly related to the child's grade achieved at age 18. The relation is nonlinear, suggesting there is a threshold, and depends on caste, household...

Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates returns to education in the labor market, often carefully addressing issues such as selection, both into wage employment and in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less...

Public sector organizations often rely on reports by local monitors that are costly to verify and that serve twin objectives: to incentivize agent performance, and to provide information for planning purposes. Received wisdom has it that pay for locally monitored performance (P4LMP) will result...

There is limited evidence on the labor market impact of diabetes, and existing evidence tends to be weakly identified. Making use of Mexican panel data to estimate individual fixed effects models, we find evidence for adverse effects of self-reported diabetes on employment probabilities, but not...

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...

The added worker effect states that unemployment of a household member leads to an increase in labour supply of another household member. This paper investigates whether there is such an effect in a developing country. We use a rich data set for urban Ethiopia. We first give a brief description...

Agricultural and other physically demanding sectors are important sources of growth in developing countries but prevalent diseases such as malaria adversely impact the productivity, labor supply, and choice of job tasks among workers by reducing physical capacity. This study identifies the...