Person:
Mansuri, Ghazala
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Rural Land, Labor and Credit Markets; Microfinance; Poverty Dynamics; Political Economy of Participatory Development; Field Experiments in Governance and Politics; Impact Evaluation of Institutional and Governance Reforms
Degrees
Departments
Poverty Reduction and Equity Group, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
July 6, 2023
Biography
Ghazala Mansuri is a Lead Economist in the Poverty Reduction and Equity Group. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University and has published extensively in leading journals in Economics and Development. Her research spans four broad areas: Rural land, labor and credit markets; the economics of household behavior; the political economy of participatory development and institutional and governance reforms for development. Her research on the political economy of local development includes a number of evaluations of participatory development programs.
Publication Search Results
1 - 4 of 4
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Publication
Labor Supply Responses to Health Shocks: Evidence from High-Frequency Labor Market Data from Urban Ghana
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-10)Workers in developing countries are subject to frequent health shocks. Using 10 weeks of high-frequency labor market data that were collected in urban Ghana, this paper documents that men are 9 percentage points more likely to work in weeks in which another worker in the household is unexpectedly ill. The paper provides suggestive evidence that these effects are strongest among very risk averse men, men in poorer households, and men who are the highest earners in their household. By contrast, women display a net zero response to another worker's illness, even women who are the highest earners in their household. -
Publication
Designing Wage Contracts in Multi-Goal Organizations
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01)Economic theory has long suggested the use of monetary incentives to motivate workers. In practice, however, public bureaucracies and nonprofit organizations are driven by a broader mission that often involves multiple operational goals, not all of which may translate equally well into measurable indicators. The authors worked with the largest partner of a prominent development organization in Pakistan called the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) and its largest partner National Rural Support Program (NRSP) who share the same mission of reducing poverty. The study was conducted in all thirty five branch offices located in fifteen districts across Sindh, Punjab, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, where NRSP was active. These results indicate that both production and cost complementarities are empirically relevant. Finally, the results suggest that financial incentives that crowd out intrinsic motivation can also affect performance by undermining the willingness of motivated employees to work in teams. -
Publication
Mission and the Bottom Line: Performance Incentives in a Multi-Goal Organization
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-12)The impact of performance pay in institutions with multiple goals depends on complementarities in the disutility cost of effort and how different tasks interact to achieve each goal. Workers of a mission-oriented nonprofit were randomly assigned to one of two bonus schemes, each incentivizing one of its two main operational goals: the performance of its microcredit program and the strengthening of community institutions of the poor. This study finds that the credit bonus improved credit-related outcomes but it undermined the social outcome. In contrast, the social bonus advanced the social mission as well as the microcredit program, but only for employees working alone, undermining the performance of employees working in teams. These results cannot be explained by a standard multitask principal-agent model featuring only complementarities in the disutility cost of effort. Instead, they suggest that production complementarities are also relevant. -
Publication
Measuring Employment: Experimental Evidence from Urban Ghana
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)Using a randomized survey experiment in urban Ghana, this paper demonstrates that the length of the reference period and the interview modality (in person or over the phone) affect how people respond in labor surveys, with impacts varying markedly by job type. Survey participants report significantly more self-employment spells when the reference period is shorter than the traditional one week, with the impacts concentrated among those in home-based and mobile self-employment. In contrast, there is no impact of the reference period on the incidence of wage employment. The wage employed report working fewer days and hours when confronted with a shorter reference period. Finally, interviews conducted on the phone yield lower estimates of employment, hours worked, and days worked among the self-employed who are working from home or a mobile location as compared with in-person interviews.