Identifying and implementing incentives that give rise to a strong relationship of accountability between service providers and beneficiaries is viewed by many as critical for improving service delivery. How to achieve this in practice and if it at all works, however, remain open questions....

This Paper exploits a unique micro-level data set on primary health care facilities in Uganda to address the question: What motivates religious not-for-profit (RNFP) health care providers? We use two approaches to identify whether an altruistic (religious) effect exists in the data. First,...

Why are firms more likely to pay bribes to bureaucrats to bend the rules in developing countries while they instead lobby the government to change the rules in more developed ones? Should we expect an evolution from bribing to lobbying, or can countries get trapped in a bribing equilibrium...

What are the most effective ways to increase primary school enrollment and student learning? We argue that innovations in governance of social services may yield the highest return since social service delivery in developing countries is often plagued by inefficiencies and corruption. We...

This paper uses a unique data set on corruption containing quantitative information on bribe payments of Ugandan firms. The data have two striking features: not all firms report that they need to pay bribes, and there is considerable variation in reported graft across firms facing similar...

According to official statistics, 20 percent of Uganda's total public expenditure was spent on education in the mid-1990s, most of it on primary education. One of the large public programs was a capitation grant to cover schools' nonwage expenditures. Using panel data from a unique survey of...

This paper presents a randomized field experiment on community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in Uganda. Through two rounds of village meetings, localized nongovernmental organizations encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision...

Why do donors and recipients act the way they do? In this paper I provide some partial answers by discussing some of the key incentive constraints facing donors and recipients. Some of these incentive constraints, like multiple objectives, difficulties in measuring output or outcomes, and weak...