IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cgd/wpaper/677.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pay-for-Performance Contracts in the Lab and the Real World: Evidence from Nigeria

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Bauhoff

    (Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

  • Eeshani Kandpal

    (Center for Global Development)

Abstract

A two-stage experiment disentangles the effect of various aspects of pay-for-performance contracts. The first is a lab-in-the-field experiment where 1,359 health workers are primed with a checklist of salient clinical tasks, then randomized within 690 clinics to receive no incentives, rewards, or penalties for treating hypothetical patients. Both rewards and penalties improve performance by 20 percent and generate spillovers on unincentivized tasks, but small incentives capture most gains. In the second stage, lab impacts translate into the real world: lab PFP exposure improves by 20 percent the care provided to real-world patients even after the lab experiment.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Bauhoff & Eeshani Kandpal, 2024. "Pay-for-Performance Contracts in the Lab and the Real World: Evidence from Nigeria," Working Papers 677, Center for Global Development.
    • Handle: RePEc:cgd:wpaper:677
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/pay-performance-contracts-lab-and-real-world-evidence-nigeria?utm_source=repec&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=repec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Pay-for-performance; Health workers; Lab-in-the-field experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
    • I11 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Analysis of Health Care Markets
    • I15 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Economic Development
    • J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets
    • M52 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cgd:wpaper:677. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Publications Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cgdevus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.