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...

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...

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 experience more intense conflict are lagging...

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...

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

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

We investigate why we observe non-negative duration dependence among young unemployed men in urban Ethiopia. Assuming that genuine duration dependence is negative, there are five explanations for a non-decreasing hazard: the presence of unemployment benefits, the existence of Active Labour...

We explore the role of reciprocity in wage determination by combining experimental and survey data. The experiment is similar to Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe`s (1995) and is conducted with Ghanaian manufacturing workers. The survey relates to the same sample workers and the firms within which they...

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...

We investigate wage and productivity profiles in the Ghanaian Manufacturing sector using matched firm and worker data. Following Medoff and Abraham (1980, 1981), we use performance appraisal as our measure of individual productivity. Controlling for a wide range of human capital variables,...