Exploiting Externalities to Estimate the Long-Term Effects of Early Childhood Deworming

Abstract

I investigate whether a school-based deworming intervention in Kenya had long-term effects on young children. I exploit positive externalities from the program to estimate impacts on younger children who were not directly treated. Ten years after the intervention, I find large cognitive effects—comparable to between 0.5 and 0.8 years of schooling—for children who were less than one year old when their communities received school-based mass deworming treatment. I find no effect on child height or stunting. I also estimate effects among children whose older siblings received treatment directly; in this subpopulation, cognition effects are nearly twice as large. (JEL I12, I18, I21, I26, I28, J13, O15)