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Abstract

This study evaluates the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the American South, which started circa 1910. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission (RSC) surveyed infection rates and found that 40 percent of school-aged children in the South were infected with hookworm. The RSC then sponsored treatment and education campaigns across the region. Follow-up studies indicate that this campaign substantially reduced hookworm disease almost immediately. Areas with higher levels of hookworm infection prior to the RSC experienced greater increases in school enrollment, attendance, and literacy after the intervention. No significant contemporaneous results are found for literacy or occupational shifts among adults, who had negligible prior infection rates. A long-term follow-up indicates a substantial gain in income that coincided with exposure to hookworm eradication. I also find evidence that the return to schooling increased with eradication.

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This is a revised version of the first chapter of my doctoral dissertation [Bleakley 2002b], which was partially summarized in Bleakley [2003]. I owe thanks to Daron Acemoglu, Joshua Angrist, David Autor, Gary Becker, Eli Berman, Patrick Buckley, Garland Brinkley, Dora Costa, Mark Duggan, Michael Greenstone, Jonathan Guryan, Christian Hansen, Gordon Hanson, Lakshmi Iyer, Simon Johnson, Lawrence Katz, Fabian Lange, Mark Lewis, Robin McKnight, Derek Neal, John Strauss, Robert Triest, Burton Weisbrod, Jonathan Zinman, several anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Boston University, the University of Chicago. Harvard University, Illinois State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, the University of Southern California, and Yale University for useful comments, and to Michael Pisa, Tareq Rashidi, and Elizabeth Stone for excellent research assistance.
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© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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