 Performance pay and information: Reducing child undernutrition in IndiaJournal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2015, vol. 112, issue C, 141-163 Abstract: This paper provides evidence for the effectiveness of performance pay to government health workers and how performance pay interacts with demand-side information. In a controlled study covering 145 child day-care centers, I implement three separate treatments. First, I engineer an exogenous change in compensation for childcare workers from fixed wages to performance pay. Second, I only provide mothers with information without incentivizing the workers. Third, I combine the first two treatments. This helps us identify if performance pay and public information are complements or substitutes in reducing child malnutrition. I find that combining incentives to workers and information to mothers reduces weight-for-age malnutrition by 4.2 percentage points in 3 months, although individually the effects are negligible. This complementarity is shown to be driven by better mother–worker communication and the mother feeding more calorific food at home. There is also a sustained long-run positive impact of the combined treatment after the experiment concluded. Keywords: Performance pay; Public health information; Child malnutrition (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:112:y:2015:i:c:p:141-163 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.01.008 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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