Intergenerational Impacts of Health Investments in Kenya

描述(由申请人提供)：该项目将创建一个不同寻常的数据集，其中包括在青春期从随机健康计划中受益的个人的孩子。该项目将利用实验变异来可信地评估这一健康计划对接受者子女的健康和认知发展的因果影响，最长可达17年后的初始计划。该项目将在肯尼亚生活小组调查中随机选择约1,500名0-5岁儿童的子集，从7,500名成年受访者中进行调查，创建新的KLPS-儿童数据集。最初的KLPS样本包括参加了早期健康研究的肯尼亚人，该研究被称为小学驱虫计划(PSDP)。从1998年开始，PSDP向肯尼亚西部农村的小学生提供驱虫药物，那里的小学分阶段的顺序是随机的。先前的研究发现，在该计划启动10年后，这种干预措施对受益者的健康、教育和劳动力市场工作时间和收入产生了实质性的积极影响。这些对父母的影响是研究受助者子女未来影响的必要前提，并估计健康干预可以在多大程度上通过改善计划受益者子女的生活结果来帮助打破贫困的代际传递。为了衡量对受援国儿童的影响，该项目将创建适合当地情况的标准和创新调查工具版本，以衡量0-5岁儿童发展的各个领域。由于PSDP受益人的选择是随机的，这些数据将能够估计该计划对受助者子女结局的因果影响，克服了混淆的关键方法问题。尽管有充分的先验理由预测父母的健康收益会在代际间传递给他们的孩子，但这些影响很少被证明是因果的，因为几乎没有父母健康的实验差异与跟踪受益人及其子女的详细数据相结合。这些信息对于试图评估健康和教育计划的成本效益的政策制定者来说是至关重要的，因为计划好处的很大一部分可能是计划参与者的子女经历的长期溢出收益的结果。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will create an unusual dataset consisting of the children of individuals who themselves benefited from a randomized health program during adolescence. This project will exploit experimental variation to credibly estimate the causal impact of this health program on the health and cognitive development of recipients' children, up to 17 years after the launch of the initial program. The project will survey a randomly selected subset of approximately 1,500 children aged 0-5 of 7,500 adult respondents in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), creating the new KLPS-Kids dataset. The original KLPS sample contains Kenyans who participated in an earlier health study, known as the Primary School Deworming Program (PSDP). The PSDP provided deworming medication to primary school students in rural western Kenya starting in 1998, where the order of phase-in to primary schools was randomized. Previous research finds that this intervention had substantial positive impacts on the health, schooling and labor market hours and earnings of beneficiaries 10 years after the launch of the program. These impacts on parents are a necessary pre-condition for studying later impacts among recipients' children, and to estimate the extent to which a health intervention can help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by improving life outcomes for program beneficiaries' children. In order to measure the impacts on the recipients' children, this project will create locally appropriate versions of both standard and innovative survey instruments designed to measure various domains of development among children aged 0-5. Since the selection of beneficiaries for the PSDP was randomized, the data will enable the estimation of causal impacts of this program on recipients' children's outcomes, overcoming the key methodological problem of confounding. Despite strong a priori reasons to anticipate significant intergenerational transmission of parent health gains to their children, these effects have rarely been demonstrated to be causal, due to the near absence of experimental variation in parent health in combination with detailed data tracking both beneficiaries and their children. This information is essential for policymakers attempting to assess the cost-effectiveness of health and education programs, as a large part of program benefits may be a result of the long-run spillover gains experienced by program participants' children.