The Impact of Dengue Fever in Early Life on Human Capital Formation

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I will investigate the impact dengue fever has on human capital formation considering exposure at different stages of early life and childhood and will provide causal estimates on the additional the societal costs of the disease so far neglected in the literature.BackgroundDengue fever is a mosquito-borne viral disease causing a flu-like illness occurring mostly in tropical and sub-tropical countries. With no vaccine or treatment available, the medical focus is on rehydration and on managing the symptoms including high temperature, severe headaches and bone, muscle and joint pain with the vast majority of patients recovering fully after 10-14 days. Dengue fever has expanded considerably over the past 50 years fuelled by increased urbanization and individual travel and today affects an estimated 390 million people in 128 countries. The World Health Organizations has called dengue fever the fastest spreading mosquito-borne disease worldwide with 'epidemic potential' putting the health of about half of the world's population at risk.ContributionDespite the relatively low mortality from the disease, dengue fever is associated with considerable socio-economic costs and there is a large body of literature providing estimates of the costs of the disease. The proposed research will help to overcome these shortcomings in existing cost estimates of the disease by explicitly providing estimates on the effects dengue fever may have from exposure in early life and childhood on a range of measures of human capital development. The research also contributes to the literature on disease burden by applying cutting-edge impact evaluation techniques mostly borrowed from labour economics to overcome methodological shortcomings that plague the literature on the cost of diseases. The proposed research will also make a contribution by combining large sets of microdata on individual dengue infections with individual educational outcomes for Brazil, a major country affected by dengue and by making this data available to the research community.Research questionsThe proposed research will address three related research questions. In the first project I will estimate the effect of dengue exposure of an unborn child during time in-utero on long-term outcomes, in particular a wide range of educational outcomes and health outcomes of children. The second part of the analysis will involve investigating the contemporaneous effect of dengue on human capital by focusing on infections of school-aged children and the effect on short-term and longer-term schooling outcomes. The third project will investigate the effects on schooling outcomes of children of the infection and subsequent absenteeism of their teachers by linking individual dengue infections to the universe of Brazilian teachers. In addition I will investigate whether parental dengue infections impact the schooling outcomes of their children by linking the data of dengue infections with parental information.Societal impactAccurate and more comprehensive estimates of the economic cost of dengue fever are crucial for a wide range of related policies in Brazil and in the other countries affected by dengue. The results from the proposed research will be important for more accurate cost-benefit analyses, which are an important evidence-base for decisions on dengue vector control programmes. In addition, six candidates for a dengue vaccine are at various stages of development; and Brazil, among other countries, will need to consider the introduction of a vaccine in the near future and then to target the subpopulations most in need when designing its immunization programme.