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Publications
Publications
  • 2015
  • Working Paper

Do-gooders and Go-getters: Career Incentives, Selection, and Performance in Public Service Delivery

By: Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera and Scott S. Lee
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
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Abstract

We study how career incentives affect who selects into public health jobs and, through selection, their performance while in service. We collaborate with the Government of Zambia to experimentally vary the salience of career incentives in a newly created health worker position when recruiting agents nationally. We find that making career incentives salient at the recruitment stage attracts health workers who are more effective at delivering health services, conducting 29% more household visits and twice as many community mobilization meetings. Administrative and survey data show an improvement in institutional deliveries, child visits, breastfeeding, immunizations, deworming and a 25% reduction in the share of underweight children in the treatment areas. While career incentives attract agents who differ on observables—they have higher skills and career ambitions—91% of the performance gap is due to unobservables. The results show that incentive design at the recruitment stage can have dramatic impacts on the performance of organizations.

Keywords

Motivation And Incentives; Health Industry; Zambia

Citation

Ashraf, Nava, Oriana Bandiera, and Scott S. Lee. "Do-gooders and Go-getters: Career Incentives, Selection, and Performance in Public Service Delivery." Working Paper, March 2015.
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More from the Authors

    • May 2018
    • Review of Financial Studies

    Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work

    By: Oriana Bandiera, Renata Lemos, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
    • October 12, 2017
    • Harvard Business Review (website)

    A Survey of How 1,000 CEOs Spend Their Day Reveals What Makes Leaders Successful

    By: Oriana Bandiera, Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Prat and Stephen Hansen
    • 2016
    • Faculty Research

    Evaluating the Effects of Large Scale Health Interventions in Developing Countries: The Zambian Malaria Initiative

    By: Nava Ashraf, Gunther Fink and David N. Weil
More from the Authors
  • Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work By: Oriana Bandiera, Renata Lemos, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
  • A Survey of How 1,000 CEOs Spend Their Day Reveals What Makes Leaders Successful By: Oriana Bandiera, Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Prat and Stephen Hansen
  • Evaluating the Effects of Large Scale Health Interventions in Developing Countries: The Zambian Malaria Initiative By: Nava Ashraf, Gunther Fink and David N. Weil
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