published in: Journal of Health Economics, 2017, 55, 219 - 231
This paper provides evidence of effectiveness for performance pay among government caregivers to improve child health in India. In a controlled study of 160 daycare centers serving over 4,000 children, we randomly assign individual workers to receive either fixed bonuses or incentive payments based on the weight-for-age nutritional status of children in their care, and also collect data from a control group receiving only their standard salary. Mothers of children in all three study arms receive nutrition information. We find that performance pay reduces the prevalence of underweight by about 5 percentage points over 3 months, and height improves by about one centimeter. Impacts are sustained in the medium term when incentives are renewed but fade when they are discontinued. Fixed bonuses lead to smaller effects. Both treatments appear to improve worker effort and communication with mothers, who in turn feed a more calorific diet to their children at home.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.