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.