Go directly to: Working Papers, Published Papers, Data and Instruments

If you would like contact info, or information about classes that I teach please go to my main page

Working Papers:

The papers listed below are part of my active research agenda.

• Improving Health Outcomes By Choosing Better Doctors: Evidence of Social Learning about Doctor Quality from Rural Tanzania (pdf version of the paper)
• Idle Chatter or Learning? Evidence from Rural Tanzania of Social Learning about Clinicians and the Health System, with S. Adelman and T. Essam, (AREC Working Paper #08-11)
• Professionalism, Latent Professionalism and Organizational Demands for Health Care Quality in a Developing Country, with M.C. Masatu [revised version of Professionalism and the role of management in health care in a developing country], (AREC Working Paper #08-10)
• Using the Hawthorne Effect to Examine the Gap Between a Doctor's Best Possible Practice and Actual Performance (AREC Working Paper # 08-04). This is an updated version of "Using the Hawthorne Effect to Examine the Gap between Medical Ability and Practice" (pdf here)
• Understaffed or Underqualified? Health Care Staffing and Patient Access to Quality Care in Rural Tanzania, with H. Klemick and M.C. Masatu (pdf version of the paper)
• Getting doctors to do their best: Ability, Altruism and Incentives (pdf version) [note that the better part of this paper has been published in JHR, see below]
• `Active Patients' in Rural African Health Care: Implications for Research and Policy (pdf version of the paper)

Links to Published or Accepted Manuscripts:

• Defining Access to Health Care: Evidence on the Importance of Quality and Distance in Rural Tanzania, [with Heather Klemick and M.C. Masatu], accepted American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AREC Working Paper # 08-03)
• Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence from a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society [with Uri Gneezy and John List], accepted Econometrica (NBER working paper number w13727)
• The Cost of Imperfect Agency in Health Care: Evidence from Rural Cameroun, Journal of Development Economics, Vol 88 (2) 2009.
• The Quality of Medical Advice in Low Income Countries, [with Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer] Journal of Economic Perspectives,  Vol 22 (2) 2008, pp. 93-114.
• Moving from the Lab to the Field: Exploring Scrutiny and Duration Effects in Lab Experiments, [with Dr. Masatu],  Economic Letters, Vol 100 (2) 2008, 284-287.
• Is patient satisfaction sensitive to changes in the quality of care? An exploitation of the Hawthorne Effect,  Journal of Health Economics,  Vol 27 (2) 2008, pp. 444-459  (This paper is the last version of a previous paper with the title "Exploiting the Hawthorne Effect to Test the Assumption of Asymmetric Information in Health Care")
• Getting doctors to do their best: the roles of ability and motivation in health care quality [with Dr. Masatu and A. Vialou], Journal of Human Resources Vol 42 (3) 2007, pp. 682-700
• Variations in the quality of care accessible to rural communities in Tanzania [with Dr. Masatu], Health Affairs 2007 Vol. 26 (3) pp. w380-w392 (pdf version of the paper)
• Learning in Health Care: Evidence of learning about clinician quality in Tanzania Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol 55 (3) 2007, pp. 531-555 (version with additional tables)
• Outpatient process quality evaluation and the Hawthorne Effect [With Dr. Masatu]   Social Science & Medicine Vol 63(9) 2006 (pdf version of the paper, including tables 5 and 6)
• The use of direct clinician observation and vignettes for health services quality evaluation in developing countries [With Dr. Masatu]  Social Science & Medicine, Vol 61(9) 2005 (pdf version of the paper)
• Outcome Versus Service Based Payment in Health Care: Lessons from African Traditional Healers [With J. Graff Zivin] Health Economics,  Vol 14 (6) 2005 (NBER working paper)
• African Traditional Healers and Outcome-Contingent Contracts in Health Care, Journal of Development Economics, Vol 72, no 1, (June) 2003 (1-22)
• The Political Economy of Improving Health Care for the Poor in Rural Africa: Institutional Solutions to the Principal-Agent Problem [with David Leonard], Journal of Development Studies, Vol 40. No 4, April 2004, pp. 50-77.
• Bypassing Health Centres in Tanzania: Revealed Preferences for Quality [with Dr. Gilbert Mliga and Dr. Damen Haile Mariam,] Journal of African Economies, Vol 11, no 4 (December) 2002 (441-471)
• When Both States and Markets Fail: Asymmetric Information and the Role of NGOs in African Health Care International Review of Law and Economics, Vol 22, issue 1 (July) 2002.
• African Traditional Healers: The Economics of Healing IK Notes, No. 32, May 2001 (also in French)
• Incentives in Rural Health Care Delivery, in Africa's Changing Markets for Health and Veterinary Services: The New Institutional Issues (Electronic Version of the Book)

Data and Instruments:

Information related to my empirical work in Tanzania, including instruments used for surveys and the forms used in experimental settings in Tanzania and India: Instruments

I am working on making available data files that have been pre-processed, in other words easy to examine. However the raw data for my papers on health care in Cameroun are available at the The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). To reach my data go to the search page and search for study number 1138.

Interviews with Traditional Healers:

As part of my study I interviewed traditional healers in Cameroun, Tanzania and Ethiopia. If you would like to read the notes of these interviews you should download this pdf file (tradheal_inter.pdf). The identities of the interviewee's cannot be released, but you probably don't need this information. The surveys are open-ended, so not all of the same questions were posed to all healers. I took notes during the interviews and wrote up my notes on the same day as the interview was completed.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view those papers and documents with the extension pdf (portable document format). To obtain your free copy, click on this get Acrobat button

kleonard@arec.umd.edu