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...

A diabetes diagnosis can motivate its recipients to reduce their health risks by changing lifestyles but can adversely affect their economic activity. We investigate the effect of a diabetes diagnosis on employment status and behavioural risk-factors taking into account their potentially...

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...

Labor market statistics are critical for assessing and understanding economic development. In practice, widespread variation exists in how labor statistics are measured in household surveys in low-income countries. Little is known whether these differences have an effect on the labor statistics...

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 health workers'...

Child labor statistics are critical for assessing the extent and nature of child labor activities in developing countries. In practice, widespread variation exists in how child labor is measured. Questionnaire modules vary across countries and within countries over time along several dimensions,...

This paper identifies five areas where climate change may impact work and draws lessons for developing countries by reviewing the evidence. Firstly, demand for labor is unevenly affected, with agriculture, heat-exposed manufacturing, and the brown energy sector experiencing downturns, while...

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...

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,...