Worms at Work: Long-run Impacts of a Child Health Investment

Sarah Baird; Joan Hamory Hicks; Michael Kremer; Edward Miguel

doi:10.3386/w21428

Worms at Work: Long-run Impacts of a Child Health Investment

Sarah Baird, Joan Hamory Hicks, Michael Kremer & Edward Miguel

Working Paper 21428

DOI 10.3386/w21428

Issue Date July 2015

Revision Date July 2016

This study estimates long-run impacts of a child health investment, exploiting community-wide experimental variation in school-based deworming. The program increased labor supply among men and education among women, with accompanying shifts in labor market specialization. Ten years after deworming treatment, men who were eligible as boys stay enrolled for more years of primary school, work 17% more hours each week, spend more time in non-agricultural self-employment, are more likely to hold manufacturing jobs, and miss one fewer meal per week. Women who were in treatment schools as girls are approximately one quarter more likely to have attended secondary school, halving the gender gap. They reallocate time from traditional agriculture into cash crops and non-agricultural self-employment. We estimate a conservative annualized financial internal rate of return to deworming of 32%, and show that mass deworming may generate more in future government revenue than it costs in subsidies.

We thank Kevin Audi, Pierre Bachas, Chris Blattman, Seth Blumberg, Hana Brown, Lorenzo Casaburi, Lisa Chen, Garret Christensen, Evan DeFilippis, Lauren Falcao, Francois Gerard, Eva Arceo Gomez, Felipe Gonzalez, Jonas Hjort, Gerald Ipapa, Maryam Janani, Anne Karing, Jen Kwok, Andrew Fischer Lees, Leah Luben, Jamie McCasland, Owen Ozier, Kristianna Post, Adina Rom, Martin Rotemberg, Jon Schellenberg, Changcheng Song, Sebastian Stumpner, Paula Vinchery, Michael Walker, Paul Wang, Zhaoning Wang and Ethan Yeh for providing excellent research assistance on the KLPS project. We thank Michael Anderson, Kathleen Beegle, Jere Behrman, David Card, Alain de Janvry, Erica Field, Fred Finan, Paul Glewwe, Michael Greenstone, Jim Heckman, Adriana Lleras-Muney, Steve Luby, Isaac Mbiti, Mark Rosenzweig, T. Paul Schultz, Jim Smith, John Strauss, Glen Weyl, Alix Zwane, seminar participants at U.C. Berkeley, USC, Harvard, the J-PAL Africa Conference, the Pacific Conference on Development Economics, UCSF, the Gates Foundation WASH Convening in Berkeley, Yale, University of Oklahoma, Hamilton College, RAND, CGD, the World Bank, Maseno University, the NBER Labor Studies group, BREAD/CEPR Meeting in Paris, American University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Stanford GSB, Makerere University, the AEA meetings (in San Diego), Notre Dame, University of Washington, Mathematica, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the International Health Economics Association conference, and the editor and four anonymous referees for helpful suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge our collaborators (International Child Support and Innovations for Poverty Action), and funding from NIH grants R01-TW05612 and R01-HD044475, NSF grants SES-0418110 and SES-0962614, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and the Berkeley Population Center. Michael Kremer declares that he works with USAID, which supports deworming, and was formerly a board member of Deworm the World, a 501(c)3 organization. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of any of our funders, nor of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Worms at Work: Long-run Impacts of a Child Health Investment

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