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...

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...

We study a model where two parties, one from the left and one from the right, compete for position. The election is to be held in the near future and the outcome is uncertain. Prior to the election, the members of both parties nominate their prime ministerial candidates. Investors care about the...

Abstract: We study how local connections to persons in influential positions affect access to migrant jobs and government employment. In rural Nepal, it would not be surprising if social status strongly influenced the access to attractive labor market opportunities. This is not the case....

Guilt averse individuals experience a utility loss if they believe they let someone down. In particular, generosity depends on what the donor believes that the recipient expects to receive. In experimental work, several authors have identified a positive correlation between such second-order...

We study the impact of anticipated face-to-face discussions among group members after they have made an anonymous contribution to a public good in an experimental setting. We find that the impact of anticipated discussions depends on how we frame the public good game. When framed in...

In this paper we investigate the incentives of unemployed workers to wait for a recall when recall probabilities are endogenously determined by the waiting decisions of others. Because of a positive externality that arise when workers seek new employment, an excessive number of workers choose to...

We have followed a pay for performance reform in the phone based customer service centre of an insurance company, from its introduction in 2001 until the end of 2004. We use hard and soft data from the design and impact of the reform to contrast two theories of work motivation; the traditional...

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...

It has been argued that monetary incentives restrain individual creativity and hamper performance in jobs requiring out of the box thinking. This paper reports from an experiment designed to test if the negative incentive effect is present also when individuals work together to solve such...