Mass vaccination and educational attainment: evidence from the 1967–68 Measles Eradication Campaign

Philipp Barteska, Sonja Dobkowitz, Maarit Olkkola and Michael Rieser

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. Our results suggest that mass vaccination against measles increased the years of education on average by about 0.1 years in the affected cohorts. We also find tentative evidence that the college graduation rate of men increased.

Keywords: infectious disease; immunization campaign; educational attainment; vaccination; public health; United States; RTG-2281 ‘‘The macroeconomics of inequality’ (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2023-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Journal of Health Economics, 1, December, 2023, 92. ISSN: 0167-6296

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120706/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Mass vaccination and educational attainment: Evidence from the 1967–68 Measles Eradication Campaign (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:120706

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().