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This paper is a practical guide (a toolkit)

In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators made unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the facilities. Averaging across the countries, about 19 percent of teachers and 35 percent of health workers were absent. The survey focused on whether providers were present in their facilities, but since many providers who were at their facilities were not working, even these figures may present too favorable a picture. For example, in India, one-quarter of government primary school teachers were absent from school, but only about one-half of the teachers were actually teaching when enumerators arrived at the schools. We will provide background on education and health care systems in developing; analyze the high absence rates across sectors and countries; investigate the correlates, efficiency, and political economy of teacher and health worker absence; and consider implications for policy.

for excellent research assistance. We are grateful to Grace Makana and her field team for collecting all the data. We thank, without implicating, the World Bank and the Government of the Netherlands for the grant that made this study possible. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Intestinal helminths-including hookworm, roundworm, whipworm, and schistosomiasis-infect more than one-quarter of the world's population. Studies in which medical treatment is randomized at the individual level potentially doubly underestimate the benefits of treatment, missing externality benefits to the comparison group from reduced disease transmission, and therefore also underestimating benefits for the treatment group. We evaluate a Kenyan project in which school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs was randomly phased into schools, rather than to individuals, allowing estimation of overall program effects. The program reduced school absenteeism in treatment schools by one-quarter, and was far cheaper than alternative ways of boosting school participation. Deworming substantially improved health and school participation among untreated children in both treatment schools and neighboring schools, and these externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing treatment. Yet we do not find evidence that deworming improved academic test scores. Copyright Econometric Society 2004.

While many developing-country policymakers see heax'y fertilizer subsidies as critical to raismg agricultural productivity, most economists see them as distortionary, regressive, environmentally unsound, and argue that they result in politicized, inefficient distribution of fertilizer supply. We model farmers as facing small fixed costs of purchasing fertilizer, and assume some are stochastically present-biased and not fully sophisticated about this bias.Even when relatively patient, such fanners may procrastinate, postponing fertilizer purchases until later periods, when they may be too impatient to purchase fertilizer. Consistent with the model, many farmers in Western Kenya fail to take advantage of apparently profitable fertilizer investments, but they do invest in response to small, time-limited discounts on the cost of acquiring fertilizer (free delivery) just after har\'est. Later discounts have a smaller impact, and when given a choice of price schedules, many farmers choose schedules that induce advance purchase. Calibration suggests such small, time-limited discounts yield higher welfare than either laissez faire or heavy subsidies by helping present-biased fanners commit to fertilizer use without inducing those with standard preferences to substantially overuse fertilizer. ' The authors are respectively from MIT (Department of between future periods). In each period /.-, with some probability p, the fanner is fairly patient (/3i. = pfi), and with probability ( 1 -p), the fanner is quite impatient {6k = Pl).Furthermore, while fanners do recognize that there is a chance that they will be impatient in the future, they overestimate the probability that they will be patient. Specifically, the probability that a patient farmer believes that she will still be patient in the future is p > p.There are several ways to interpret this stochastic rate of discount. One interpretation is that farmers are literally partially naive about their hyperbolic discounting, as in the original O'Donoghue and Rabin (1999) Define the incremental yield to fertilizer as jWe assume that the cost of reselling fertilizer is sufficiently large to discourage even (1)>y (2) .': (4 •'Rearranging, we find that the farmer will wait ifWhen p = 0, the right hand side is equal to /3//(y(l) -1). If we assume that the utilir\' cost of using fertilizer is small enough that /?//(y(l) -1) is larger than / + -~-^, then the right 10 hand side of the inequality is larger than the left hand side. For the remainder of the model, we assume that p > p*{R). Note that since impatient period 1 fanners will not save in any case, it is not necessan,' that they believe they will be more patient in the future than they are in the present for this procrastination problem to arise.Instead, it is only necessary that patient farmers overestimate the probability that they will continue to be patient in the fuaire. This tendency to believe that future tastes will more closely resemble current tastes than they actually will, termed "projection bias," has found c...

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