worms

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Nov 2 16:17:16 PST 2001


"Worms: Education and Health Externalities in Kenya"

BY: EDWARD MIGUEL

University of California at Berkeley

Department of Economics

MICHAEL KREMER

Harvard University

Department of Economics

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

The Brookings Institution

Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=284053

Paper ID: NBER Working Paper No. W8481

Date: September 2001

Contact: EDWARD MIGUEL

Email: Mailto:emiguel at econ.berkeley.edu

Postal: University of California at Berkeley

Department of Economics

Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 USA

Co-Auth: MICHAEL KREMER

Email: Mailto:mkremer at fas.harvard.edu

Postal: Harvard University

Department of Economics

Rm. 207

Littauer Center

Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

Paper Requests:

Full-Text downloads are available from SSRN Online for $5.

ABSTRACT:

Intestinal helminths - including hookworm, roundworm,

schistosomiasis, and whipworm - infect more than one-quarter of

the world's population. A randomized evaluation of a project in

Kenya suggests that school-based mass treatment with deworming

drugs reduced school absenteeism in treatment schools by one

quarter; gains are especially large among the youngest children.

Deworming is found to be cheaper than alternative ways of

boosting school participation. By reducing disease transmission,

deworming creates substantial externality health and school

participation benefits among untreated children in the treatment

schools and among children in neighboring schools. These

externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing

treatment. We do not find evidence that deworming improves

academic test scores. Existing experimental studies, in which

treatment is randomized among individuals in the same school,

find small and insignificant deworming treatment effects on

education; however, these studies underestimate true treatment

effects if deworming creates positive externalities for the

control group and reduces treatment group attrition.



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