Addressing Absence.

This paper brings together evidence from a number of randomized experiments designed to address the problem of absence of teachers and health providers in developing countries. The goal is to see what, if any, lessons we can draw from them. Our tentative conclusion is that these service providers are willing to respond even to quite moderate incentives. The constraint seems to be in getting the incentives implemented: participants in the system, including both supervisors and beneficiaries, seem unwilling or unable do so. This suggests that, at this stage, fighting absence will either require incentives implemented from outside the system or a large enough boost to demand that the beneficiaries are willing to assume some degree of control. The long-run benefits might be large if these interventions help to break the vicious cycle of low performance and low expectations. ∗ Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo are both Professors of Economics and Directors of the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. We thank Angus Deaton, Rachel Glennerster, Rema Hanna, Neelima Khethan, Michael Kremer, Sendhil Mullainathan and Christel Vermeesh for their inputs and comments, and Annie Duflo, Greg Fischer, Shehla Imran, Neeraj Negi and Callie Scott for outstanding research assistance. We are grateful to the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University, the National Institutes of Health, and the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation for financial support of the Udaipur health facility survey and the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation for financial support of the NFE absence project. Duflo thanks the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for financial support while conducting this research.