The Making of a Public Sector Worker: The Causal Effects of Temporary Work Assignments to Poor Areas
| Areas | : | Health and nutrition |
|---|---|---|
| Researcher/s in charge | : | Juan Jose Diaz, Alan Sanchez, Patrick Agte, Mariel Bedoya |
| Other researchers | : | Dianela Espinoza |
| Execution time | : | September 2023 |
Presentation
Many developed and developing countries, including Peru, experience an unequal distribution of health workers between rural and urban areas (WHO, 2022). Motivated by recent literature suggesting that beliefs and preferences are malleable, this project seeks to understand whether temporary assignments of health workers to poor areas can address rural worker shortages by changing subsequent beliefs, preferences, and career choices. To answer this question, this study takes advantage of the Service Rural Urban Marginalized Rural Service (SERUMS) lottery system for the psychology profession. Under this scheme, participating psychologists randomly choose a location to complete this mandatory 12-month service program in Peru. Preliminary results from the first round of data collection show that psychologists who chose later in the lottery process completed the program in poorer and more remote locations. This would also translate into employment trajectories: the bottom third of the lottery is 8.8 percentage points (16%) more likely to work for the public sector after the program and 8.7 percentage points (86%) more likely to work later in the poorest districts of the country. An analysis of mechanisms suggests that the increase in prosociality would be a main mechanism. Alternative explanations linked to inertia or differences in hiring capacity due to differential network and skill formation. As a next step, this project seeks to collect data from 692 psychologists who completed and will complete SERUMS in May and November 2023, respectively. Surveys will be sent via email and reminder calls will be made to increase the response rate.
