Working Hard or Hardly Working: Health Worker Effort and Health Outcomes

Edward N. Okeke

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2021, vol. 70, issue 1, 1 - 39

Abstract: Effort by health workers in developing countries has been the subject of much recent attention, but the implications, if any, for health outcomes have largely remained a matter of conjecture. This paper provides new empirical evidence about the returns to health worker effort. In this experiment, outpatient providers in Nigeria were assigned to an intervention in which their consultations were monitored by a peer. To elicit behavior under the counterfactual, the same group of clinicians was covertly observed. Exploiting the sharp increase in effort induced by peer monitoring, I document large, positive, and statistically significant improvements in health. These findings shed new light on potential gains from incentivizing health worker effort.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/706823 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/706823 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/706823

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().