This question is repeated for a range of salaries, with _$_ taking the value of 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000 and 1200 respectively, and is asked both for a rural (200 km from Addis Ababa) and remote postings (500 km from Addis Ababa). For medical students the basic salaries are 1200, 1300, 1500, 1700, 1900 and 2100. Figure 1 plots the cumulative distribution for the contingent valuation of the choice of rural versus urban posting for alternative wages for nurses. As expected the cumulative distribution for a rural post (200 km from Addis Ababa) dominates the distribution for a remote post (500 km away from Addis Ababa). Focusing on the contingent valuation wages for the remote area, 500km from Addis Ababa, the graph illustrates that at the current monthly wage of 700 Birr, about one-third of the starting nurses are willing to work in a remote area. As the rural wage increases, the number of nurses willing to work in a remote area rises, but not in a linear way. Beyond 1,000 Birr, marginal take up decreases. Figure 2 plots the density function of the reservation wage to work in a rural area for nursing and medical students separately. The distribution for nurses is bimodal, that for medical students heavily skewed to the left.<sup>19</sup> Another methodological challenge concerns the measurement of personal motivation. Although it has received increasing attention from a theoretical point of view, there is no clear agreement on how to measure it. Even when we focus on health work, the multi dimensional nature of motivation implies difficulties to agree on a compact measure (see Franco, Bennett, & Kanfer, 2002). With this in mind, we take a pragmatic approach focusing on the context of the medical profession and rural posting. In this context we expect the motivation to help the poor – equivalent to healing the most severely ill patients since health and income poverty are strongly related - to play an important role.<sup>20</sup> The variable we use is based on a pre-coded survey question about the relative importance of different job attributes. All listed attributes are at least partially driven by extrinsic motivation (career concerns, salary, etc.), with the exception of ‘opportunity to help the poor’. The intrinsic motivation variable is then constructed as a dummy variable indicating that ‘opportunity to help the poor’ is ranked highest. Because our analysis indicates that this variable is an important determinant of willingness to work in a rural area, we also look at what determines an individual’s willingness to serve the poor and endeavor to explore the extent to which it might be possible to influence such motivations.

> 19 The validity of the reservation wages obtained from contingent valuation is supported by two additional results.  To capture the long term preference and expectation of the students with respect to urban or rural posting, we asked two more questions: whether the long term preference is to work in an urban or rural area; and what they think their employment situation will be in five years. The answers to both questions are highly corelated with the reservation wages obtained from contingent valuation with as correlation coefficients  -0.43 and -0.83 respectively.

> 20 Agreement on the importance of this norm is of course best reflected in the Hyppocratic Oath: ‘treat the sick to the best of one’s ability’.

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