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 occupational choice of workers in these sectors by reducing physical capacity. This study...

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...

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...

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...

We study the relationship between physical activity as a direct measure of effort and productivity. First, we evaluate the association of agricultural workers' physical activity with their daily productivity, which is directly observed from company personnel piece-rate payment records, and find...

This paper analyzes how the employment/productivity profile of growth and its sectoral pattern are correlated with poverty reduction. The authors use a sample of 104 short-run growth spells in developing countries, between 1980 and 2001. They also identify some conditions of the labor market and...

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, Barr, Lindelouml;w, and Serneels use an economic experiment to investigate the determinants of corrupt...

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. Using a standard job search model we test the two main explanations why we...

This paper investigates the nature of unemployment among young men in urban Ethiopia and finds that it is concentrated among relatively well-educated first-time job seekers who aspire to a public sector job and spend on average close to four years in unemployment. This is consistent with a...

Geographical imbalances in the health workforce have been a consistent feature of nearly all health systems, and especially in developing countries. In this paper we investigate the willingness to work in a rural area among final year nursing and medical students in Ethiopia. Analyzing data...