Performance Pay and Information: Reducing Child Malnutrition in Urban Slums

Prakarsh Singh

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper provides evidence for the effectiveness of performance pay to government workers and how performance pay interacts with demand-side information. In an experiment covering 145 child day-care centres, 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% 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; Child malnutrition; Public health; Information; Complementarity; Nutrition; Public sector; Urban slums (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D61 H41 H75 I12 I18 I38 J13 J33 L38 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-exp, nep-hea, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:29403

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