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Title: The Human Capital Benefits of Vaccination: Evidence from the United States' Earliest School Vaccination Mandates
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2020
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Abstract: This study evaluates the health and economic consequences of state laws that required children to be vaccinated against smallpox to attend school in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Utilizing a novel dataset of vaccination legislation, I first show that school vaccination mandates substantially reduced smallpox rates. Next, leveraging the staggered roll-out of mandates within a difference-indifferences framework, I demonstrate that childhood exposure to school vaccination improved long-run adult occupational status by increasing average annual incomes by approximately three percent. Event studies confirm the causal nature of this relationship by illustrating that benefits only appeared for those who were of schooling age and younger when a mandate was passed. I attribute these benefits to vaccination incentivizing human capital investment. As evidence, difference-indifferences results show that vaccination laws increased school enrollment and decreased labor market participation of teens. Lastly, I demonstrate that anti-vaccination beliefs muted the benefits of vaccination. Children of German immigrants, who were known for their anti-vaccination beliefs, benefited significantly less from vaccination laws in the short-and long-run. This serves as both a falsification test for my results as well as evidence anti-vaccination beliefs may temper the impact of vaccination policies. These findings speak to the importance of childhood vaccination for both health and human capital development. Moreover, they shed new light on the cost of American institutions that struggled to widely promote school vaccination mandates in the fight against smallpox.
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Authors: Holtkamp, Nicholas
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Health
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