Health, Education, and Economic Development

发达国家的研究人员早就知道健康、教育和劳动力市场结果之间的联系。最近也越来越多地认识到，健康，特别是热带病，可能在较不发达国家的长期贫困中发挥重要作用。然而，由于难以理清健康、教育和收入之间的因果关系，研究进展缓慢，部分原因是缺乏适当的数据来调查这种关系。这项研究依靠可信的方法和原始的数据收集，通过三个相互关联的项目来解决这些问题。第一个项目考察了肯尼亚农村地区以学校为基础的卫生项目的长期影响。从1998年开始提供肠道蠕虫(蠕虫)免费医疗。肠道蠕虫感染了这个地区90%以上的小学生。1998-2001年期间，学校随机“分阶段”进行了医疗治疗，这一前瞻性项目设计有助于克服在健康收益和后来的结果之间确定因果关系方向的问题。这项研究建立在现有的这些学龄儿童的教育和健康结果数据库的基础上，所产生的数据集将包含十年来独特的纵向教育、劳动力市场、人口和健康信息。如果从驱虫中获得的儿童健康收益与成人贫困之间存在密切联系，那么这一结果可能会证明增加对儿童健康和营养计划的公共投资是合理的。第二个项目还使用前瞻性研究设计，在印度德里的城市贫民窟调查了儿童健康和教育之间的联系。这项研究评估了一个项目的影响，该项目通过现有的学前网络向2-6岁的儿童提供补铁和驱虫药物。第三个项目侧重于相关但不同的问题，即个人如何了解新的卫生技术，并做出采用决定，在这种情况下是为了肯尼亚的驱虫药物。一种新的实验方法被用来估计药物采用中的“同伴效应”，我们使用一个新的社会学习模型来解释实验结果。这项研究将极大地有助于我们理解欠发达国家健康与教育和劳动力市场结果之间的因果联系。

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.