Mosquitoes: The Long-term Effects of Malaria Eradication in India

David Cutler, Winnie Fung, Michael Kremer, Monica Singhal, Tom Vogl

NBER Working Paper No. 13539
Issued in October 2007, Revised in August 2009
NBER Program(s):Children, Economics of Education, Health Care, Health Economics, Labor Studies, Public Economics

We examine the effects of malaria on educational attainment and income by exploiting geographic variation in malaria prevalence in India prior to a nationwide eradication program in the 1950s. We find that the program led to modest increases in income for prime age men. This finding is robust to using very localized sources of geographic variation and to instrumenting for pre-eradication prevalence with climate factors. We do not observe improvements in income for women, suggesting that observed effects are likely driven by increased labor market productivity. We find no evidence of increased educational attainment for men, and mixed evidence for women.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w13539