Elsevier

Journal of Health Economics

Volume 48, July 2016, Pages 135-148
Journal of Health Economics

Village sanitation and child health: Effects and external validity in a randomized field experiment in rural India

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2016.03.003Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Many people in developing countries defecate in the open without using a toilet.

  • We study a field experiment of the effects of sanitation on child height in India.

  • We find that the program caused children to grow taller, on average.

Abstract

Over a billion people worldwide defecate in the open, with important consequences for early-life health and human capital accumulation in developing countries. We report a cluster randomized controlled trial of a village sanitation intervention conducted in rural Maharashtra, India designed to identify an effect of village sanitation on average child height, an outcome of increasing importance to economists. We find an effect of approximately 0.3 height-for-age standard deviations, which is consistent with observations and hypotheses in economic and health literatures. We further exploit details of the planning and implementation of the experiment to study treatment heterogeneity and external validity.

JEL classification

O12

Keywords

Sanitation
Health
Experiment
External validity
India

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