Professor Marcos Vera-Hernandez

A central issue in designing incentive contracts is the decision to reward agents’ input use versus outputs. The trade-off between risk and return to innovation in production can also lead agents with varying skill levels to perform differentially under different con- tracts. We study this issue experimentally, observing and verifying inputs and outputs in Indian maternity care.

We examine how the effects of incentivizing individuals to use healthcare depend on the capacity of the health system.

Unlike performance incentives for private sector managers, little is known about performance incentives for managers in public sector bureaucracies. Through a randomized trial in rural China, we study performance incentives rewarding school administrators for reducing student anemia—as well as complementarity between incentives and orthogonally assigned discretionary resources.

Journal article published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly on Colombia study on the impact of childcare centres and home-based childcare on child cognitive and socio-emotional development.

This paper studies the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. It shows that under limited commitment with coalitional deviations, this relationship is theoretically ambiguous.

This paper uses data from a cluster randomised trial of a participatory learning and action cycle (PLA) through women’s groups, to assess the role of extended family networks as a determinant of gains in health knowledge and health practice.

An informational intervention in Western Kenya

This paper uses administrative National Health Service hospital records to examine key features of public hospital spending in England.

Community-based interventions, particularly group-based ones, are considered to be a cost-effective way of delivering interventions in low-income settings. However, design features of these programs could also influence dimensions of household and community behaviour beyond those targeted by the intervention. This paper studies spillover effects of a participatory community health intervention in rural Malawi, implemented through a cluster randomised control trial, on an outcome not directly targeted by the intervention: household consumption smoothing after crop losses.

We conducted a retrospective study of breast feeding in the years 2005 and 2010, comparing breast feeding incidence rates by day of week of birth.

This paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural Malawi that provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition. The intervention improved child nutrition, household food consumption and consequently health. We find evidence that labor supply also increased.

The objective of this paper is to understand and test empirically the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. Models of informal risk sharing with limited commitment and grim-trigger punishments upon deviation imply that larger groups provide better informal insurance.

These sheets provide sample size calculators to accompany the IFS working paper WP15/17, "Going beyond simple sample size calculations: a practitioner's guide".

In this paper, the authors compile available methods for sample size calculations for continuous and binary outcomes with and without covariates, for both clustered and non-clustered RCTs.

This paper uses administrative National Health Service (NHS) hospital records to examine key features of public hospital spending in England.

In this note, the authors provide evidence indicating that extended families are important in this context, before demonstrating that it is vital to understand their effects on household well-being, and that there is a role for government intervention. The authors further summarise work undertaken by EDePo that shows the need to incorporate the extended family in order to design effective policies and interventions.