Researchers in developed countries have long known of the link between health and education and labor market outcomes. There has also recently been a growing awareness of the important role that health, and in particular tropical disease, may play in perpetuating poverty in less developed countries. However, research progress has been slowed by difficulties in disentangling the causal relationships between health, education, and income partly because of lack of suitable data to investigate the relationship. This research relies on credible methods and original data collection to address these issues, through three inter-related projects.
The first project examines the long-run impact of a school-based health program in rural Kenya. Free medical treatment for intestinal helminthes (worms) was provided starting in 1998. Intestinal worms infect over 90 percent of primary school children in this area. Medical treatment was randomly "phased in" to the schools during 1998-2001, and this prospective project design helps overcome the problem of establishing the direction of causality between health gains and later outcomes. The research builds on an existing database of educational and health outcomes for these school children, and the resulting dataset will contain unique longitudinal educational, labor market, demographic, and health information over ten years. If there are strong links between child health gains from de-worming and adult poverty, the results may justify increased public investments in child health and nutrition programs.
The second project also examines the link between child health and education using a prospective research design, but in the urban slums of Delhi, India. This study evaluates the impact of a project, which delivered Iron supplementation and de-worming drugs to 2-6 year old children through an existing pre-school network. The third project focuses on the related, but distinct, issue of how individuals learn about new health technologies, and make adoption decisions, in this case for de-worming drugs in Kenya. A novel experimental methodology is used to estimate "peer effects" in drug adoption, and we interpret the empirical results using a new model of social learning. This research will greatly contribute to our understanding of the causal link between health and educational and labor market outcomes in Less Developed Countries.
