Oriana Bandiera
Oriana Bandiera is a Research Programme Director for the IGC State research programme and Member of the IGC Steering Group.
She is also a Professor of Economics at the LSE and the Director of STICERD. She is a member of IZA, CEPR, BREAD, EUDN and JPAL-Europe. Her primary research interests are in labour economics, development economics, and the economics of organisations. In 2007 she was jointly awarded the IZA Young Labor Economist Prize. She is an editor of the BE Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy and on the board of the Journal of Economic Literature. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. She is the 2011 recipient of Carlo Alberto medal, awarded biennally to an Italian economist under the age of 40 for “outstanding research contributions to the field of economics.”
Content by Oriana Bandiera
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Publication - Evidence Paper
IGC evidence paper - State effectiveness
This evidence paper explores the key theme of state effectiveness. The central objective of this theme of research is building effective states to improve economic governance in developing countries and generate higher rates of inclusive growth. The first pillar of this research agenda centres on escaping the fragility trap, building a functioning state, strengthening...
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Publication - Project Report
Vocational training, on-the-job training, and resilience to the COVID-19 shock
In this final report, we use data from a phone survey with young workers tracked regularly since 2012 as part of an RCT on active labour market policies (Alfonsi et al. 2020) to document how they were impacted by the COVID-19 related lockdown. We targeted 1,700 young workers and successfully traced and interviewed 74% of them. The survey was conducted between October and...
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Publications Reader Item
Do social assistance programmes reach the poor? Micro-evidence from 123 countries
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Publication - Growth Brief
Do social assistance programmes reach the poor? Micro-evidence from 123 countries
Governments around the world rely on social assistance to reduce poverty, but the poorest are left behind. There has been a sharp reduction in global poverty over the past 25 years, from 36% in 1990 to 10% in 2015. Yet, 736 million people continue to live on less than USD 1.90 a day (World Bank, 2015), most of them in middle-income countries. In recent years, the largest...
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Blog post
What happens after the lockdown ends? Lessons from the 2015 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone
There have now been over 5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world, with the number of deaths moving towards 350,000. Policymakers in many countries have responded to the pandemic by implementing measures related to social distancing and a large share of humanity remains in some form of lockdown condition. As a consequence of the uncertainty caused by the...
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Publication - Growth Brief
Making the workplace work for women
The traditional economic rationale for increased female labour force participation is that it benefits women directly and society indirectly. A new argument looks at how increased female labour force participation can boost aggregate economic growth and hence, benefit everyone, on average. Yet, several factors hinder women’s productive employment. This Growth Brief...
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Publications Reader Item
Making the workplace work for women
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Project
The long-term impact of vocational training and job search assistance for unemployed youth: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Uganda
Youth unemployment and underemployment are key policy challenges in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where 60% of the population is below the age of 25 and where it is expected to generate one million new unemployed in 2018 alone. This project seeks to provide new evidence on the effectiveness of active labour market policies in improving youth...
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Project
Empowerment and livelihood for adolescents in Sierra Leone
Adolescence is a pivotal time for girls, it is a critical stage to create pathways for healthy and productive adulthoods. However, adolescent girls face unique barriers that restrict their horizons. This includes concurrent labour market, fertility decisions, and limited access to formal education. These considerations were at the core of our evaluation of the Empowerment...
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Data Item
Data: What do Indian CEOs do? Time use of Indian top executives: Determinants and implications for growth
We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs, and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs’ diaries in a detailed and comparable fashion, and to build a bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply. The comparison of 1,114 family and professional CEOs reveals that family CEOs work...
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Publication - Project Report
Missing links and mismatches: Data challenges with policy implications
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Publication - Working Paper
The economic lives of young women in the time of Ebola: Lessons from an empowerment programme
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Publication - Project Report
Motivating bureaucrats: Autonomy vs performance pay for public procurement in Pakistan
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Blog post
Harnessing technology for public sector reform: Procurement in Pakistan
Procurement decision making and access to information “Procurement decisions take up 20-25% of my time in a week, and given my other obligations, I cannot afford to spend more time on this activity”, explains Mr. Ashraf, an Executive Engineer in the Communication and Works Department in Punjab. His task at hand today is to procure more printing paper for his subsidiary...
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Publication - Project Report
Decentralisation in Zambia: A comparative analysis of strategies and barriers to implementation
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Publication - Project Report
Motivating bureaucrats - Autonomy vs performance pay for public procurement in Pakistan
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Publication - Project Report
Evaluating Zambia's 2013 salary reform
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Publication - Growth Brief
Rewarding bureaucrats: Can incentives improve public sector performance?
This brief synthesises lessons from the latest research on strategies to improve the performance of public sector workers, including government administrators and frontline service providers, such as teachers and health workers. The focus is on strategies for recruiting and motivating the public sector workforce.
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Publications Reader Item
Rewarding bureaucrats: Can incentives improve public sector performance?
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Project
Supporting procurement reforms in Punjab
Public procurement systems are essential in facilitating government investments in infrastructure, health, education, and other public services. In developing countries, high rates of corruption and leakage may lower the efficiency of government procurement, potentially reducing the value generated by money spent. Following on from a previous IGC-funded project...
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Project
Productivity in the civil service: Understanding the impact of payroll reform on worker performance
The provision of public services depends critically on the skills and motivation of the agents tasked with providing them. And yet, civil servant underperformance plagues many countries, with cross-national studies reporting average daily absenteeism rates among public health workers and teachers of 19 and 35 percent, respectively. This project covers the initial steps...
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Publications Reader Item
Transforming the economic lives of the ultra-poor
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Project
The design of anti-poverty transfers to the ultra-poor: Asset transfers or cash transfers?
A major challenge faced by government in low-income countries is how to reduce poverty in a sustainable way. Recent evidence suggests that the “Targeting the Ultrapoor” (TUP) program pioneered by BRAC in Bangladesh has proven very effective and portable across diverse low-income settings. As a consequence, up to 30 governments were piloting variants of TUP by the end...
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Publication - Working Paper
Do-gooders and go-getters: Career incentives, selection, and performance in public service delivery
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Project
Recruiting and motivating community health workers: Measuring impact through a nationwide household survey
This is a follow-up project from Recruiting and motivating health workers in Zambia. We study how career incentives affect who selects into public health jobs and, through selection, their performance while in service. We collaborate with the Government of Zambia to design a field experiment embedded in the national recruitment campaign for a new health worker...
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Project
Pilot study on productivity in the civil service: Understanding the impact of compensation as a driver of worker performance
While the effect of performance related incentives on productivity has been widely addressed in the literature (e.g. Bandiera, Barankay, and Rasul (2005), (2007), (2009); Ashraf, Bandiera, and Jack (2014); Hearer (2004); Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan, (2012); Lazear (2000); Fryer (2011); Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2011)), the impact of an exogenous increase in wages in the...
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Project
Decentralisation of Government in Zambia: Baseline survey and a global comparative analysis of strategies and barriers to implementation
A decentralised public service is widely perceived to more effectively respond to local community needs. As in other post-colonial states, there has been a push toward decentralisation in Zambia since independence; implementation, however, has lagged due largely to uncertainty on optimal rollout strategies given capacity limitations at the local level. With the change in...
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Publication - Project Memo
Recruiting and motivating health workers in Zambia (Project Memo)
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Multimedia Item - Video
Tackling extreme poverty: Transforming the lives of the ultra-poor (Film)
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Publication - Growth Brief
Growth brief: Transforming the economic lives of the ultra-poor
Despite considerable progress in recent decades, nearly 1 billion people worldwide live below the international extreme poverty line of $1.90 per day. A group that has been particularly hard to reach with anti-poverty programmes are the ‘ultra-poor’. With low assets and few skills, the ultra-poor work largely in insecure wage labour, do not participate in...
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Project
How did Ebola impact the economic lives of adolescent girls? Evidence on pregnancies, human capital accumulation, and labour force participation in Sierra Leone
While disease transmission of Ebola has largely been brought under control, the epidemic has left deep marks on the Sierra Leonean economy. These effects are thought to be particularly severe for adolescent girls and young women. According to data obtained using high-frequency phone surveys, youth unemployment has soared and non-farm household enterprises, the sector most...
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Multimedia Item - Video
Africa Growth Forum 2015: Improving the delivery of services (Professor Oriana Bandiera)
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Blog post
Hiring Do-Gooders or Go-Getters: Attracting talent to improve public service delivery
What is the best strategy for attracting the strongest candidates into government jobs? This widespread challenge is particularly relevant in developing countries, where low skills and motivation among public sector workers often translates into poor-quality essential public services like health and education. Effective governance requires recruiting and retaining people...
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Publication - Project Memo
Basic Entrepreneurship: A Big New Idea in Development (Project Memo)
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Project
What do Indian CEOs do? Time use of Indian top executives: Determinants and implications for growth
Managerial practices are a key determinant of firm productivity, and yet little is known about the managerial capital of the top executives who shape these practices. Using a novel survey instrument, we record with unparalleled detail the activities undertaken by 357 Chief Executive Officers of listed Indian manufacturing firms over a specific, exogenously chosen, window of...
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Multimedia Item - Video
Growth Week 2014: Framework Session - Transforming the Public Sector
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Multimedia Item - Audio
Growth Week 2014: Research Session - Large Firms
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Publication - Working Paper
Women’s Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomised Control Trial in Africa (Working Paper)
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Project
Women’s Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomised Control Trial in Africa
Women in developing countries are disempowered relative to their contemporaries in developed countries. High youth unemployment and early marriage and childbearing interact to limit human capital investment and enforce dependence on men. In this paper, we evaluate an attempt to jump-start adolescent women’s empowerment in the world’s second youngest country: Uganda....
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Publication - Working Paper
Can basic entrepreneurship transform the economic lives of the poor? (Working Paper)
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Project
Basic entrepreneurship: A big new idea in development
Evaluation of the BRAC ultra-poor programme in Bangladesh. Targeting households of ultra-poor women, BRAC's programme has reached 1.6 million households. Project led to a 37% average increase in annual earnings. The world’s poorest people lack both capital and skills. They tend to engage in low-skilled wage labour activities that are insecure...
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Project
Motivating bureaucrats: Autonomy vs performance pay for public procurement in Pakistan
Pakistan faces growing spending needs and must meet them with limited resources. This is particularly the case for provincial governments who have devolved responsibility for service delivery. It is crucial that available resources are spent in a cost-effective manner. The project’s main goal was to ensure ‘better value for money’ by incentivising procuring...
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Publication - Evidence Paper
IGC Evidence Paper - State
In a sizable number of developing countries, the public sector fails to provide many, if not most, critical public goods necessary for economic development. The presence of a well-functioning state is key to encouraging economic growth. Part of this concerns having a public sector that has the capacity to raise revenues and spend them effectively; and that policymakers...
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Multimedia Item - Video
Video: Health workers in Zambia - Co-producing knowledge
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Publication - Working Paper
Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work
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Blog post
Creating Entrepreneurs: A Big New Idea in Development
Can the world’s poorest people become entrepreneurs? This column outlines results from an evaluation of the Ultra Poor programme in Bangladesh, a scheme that the NGO behind it claims is a staggering success. From an economist’s point of view, the world’s poorest people typically lack two things: capital and skills. They tend to work for others in jobs that are...
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Blog post
Recruiting and compensating civil servants: A field experiment in Zambia
The civil service – public cadres of bureaucrats, local administrators, teachers and health workers – is a key component of the state's capacity to govern and provide public goods. In the effort to create an effective civil service, states face key questions regarding how to recruit, train and motivate competent agents to ensure their high performance and long-term...
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Publication - Policy Brief
Incentives, Culture and Development: A Cross-Country Field Experiment (Policy Brief)
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Publication - Working Paper
Can “good” HR practices be exported? Evidence from a field experiment in Ghana (Working Paper)
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Publication - Policy Brief
Basic Entrepreneurship: A Big New Idea in Development (Policy Brief)
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Publication - Policy Brief
Managerial Capital at the Top: Evidence on CEOs Time Use and Firm Performance in India
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Project
Culture and incentives: A cross-country field experiment
Recent survey evidence shows that the most profitable and productive firms tend to adopt personnel policies that link pay to performance and that firms in low-income countries are less likely to use these “good” human resources management practices. Incentive pay is a key component of management strategy, and yet field evidence on the impacts of both individual and team...
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Project
Recruiting and motivating health workers in Zambia
Incentives in the selection of public service delivery workers are essential to improving their motivation. Researchers used field experiments with community health assistants in Zambia to evaluate different recruitment strategies. Compared to social incentives, career incentives attract more productive applicants. The findings from this project...