Authors’ response to Unjournal evaluations of “Intergenerational Child Mortality Effects of Deworming: Experimental Evidence from Two Decades of the Kenya Life Panel Survey.”

Manager’s note: This response was shared by Michael Walker, “on behalf of the paper authors”.

We thank the Unjournal [evaluation manager] and evaluators for helpful comments on the paper “Intergenerational Child Mortality Effects of Deworming: Experimental Evidence from Two Decades of the Kenya Life Panel Survey.” We are currently in the process of revising the paper, and will take these comments into consideration (along with other feedback from referees), and will update this note to point readers to relevant parts of the revised paper when available.

There are two initial points that we wanted to note:

1. The version of the paper reviewed by the evaluators was written to meet “short paper” requirements at economics journals, which typically require no more than 5 exhibits and 6,000 words. As this is substantially shorter than many full-length economics papers, it necessitated some difficult choices on measures and analyses to focus on in the main paper. We are currently expanding the paper to a full-length economics article which will provide additional space for more details and analyses raised by the evaluators.

2. We wish to clarify a point around Evaluator 2’s comment on the pre-specified regression specification. The pre-analysis plan referenced excluding treatment participants in a subsequent randomized vocational training program and cash grants program (the TVVP (2009-11) and SCY (2013-14) interventions, respectively – see Figure A.1, “Primary School Deworming Project (PSDP) and Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS) Timeline”). It is these treatment group individuals (and their births) that are excluded from the analysis, with the control group upweighted to maintain the original representativeness. Schools in the cost-sharing intervention, administered in 2001 to a (random) subset within Group 1 and Group 2 PSDP schools, are included in the analysis as pre-specified, along with an indicator for being in a cost-sharing school. Thus we believe this is consistent with the pre-specified analysis.

   • Manager’s note: We shared this response with the second evaluator, and they removed this point from their report.