Financial Incentives as Signals: Experimental Evidence from the Recruitment of Village Promoters in Uganda

By Erika Deserranno. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2019

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I study the role of financial incentives as signals of job characteristics when these are unknown to potential applicants. To this end, I create experimental variation in expected earnings and use that to estimate the effect of financial incentives on candidates’ perception of a brand-new health-promoter position in Uganda and on the resulting size and composition of the applicant pool. I find that more lucrative positions are perceived as entailing a lower positive externality for the community and discourage agents with strong pro-social preferences from applying. While higher financial incentives attract more applicants and increase the probability of filling a vacancy, the signal they convey reduces the ability to recruit the most socially motivated agents, who are found to stay longer on the job and to perform better. (JEL D82, I18, J31, J63, M52, O15)

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2f4eb0344acd6fc7e44d26c9cbef4f8dd4a7ee0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. Nava Ashraf
2. O. Bandiera
3. Simone G. Schaner
4. M. Lowe
5. Rachel Heath
6. Jonathan Robinson
7. Juan-Camilo Cardenas
8. Jeffrey P. Carpenter

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Nava Ashraf
2. O. Bandiera
3. M. Lowe
4. Erika Deserranno

In Safety Research

1. Nava Ashraf
2. O. Bandiera
3. M. Lowe
4. Erika Deserranno
5. John A. List
6. Stephan Klasen

Citations in the corpus

• Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College (unknown): “In any case, the identification of pre-Achaemenid deposits at Akra has perhaps greater implications for our understanding of the effects of the Achaemenid empire in the east than the historical identification of the settlement, and it is to this issue that we will now turn.”
• Social Incentives in Organizations (2018, background): “Deserranno (2017) employs a similar design to hire NGO workers for a job that consists of two tasks: basic goods sales (soap, oil etc) and health promotion.”