Maggie Greenberg, Ryan Panek

This summer we worked with Professor Atwood to examine the educational impact of the measles vaccine in Texas. Professor Atwood has previously studied the impact of the measles vaccine on employment and earnings in the U.S. in her 2022 paper. Professor Atwood and Professor Pearlman worked together on examining the impact of the measles vaccine on both schooling and labor market outcomes in Mexico in their paper from May 2024. Through our research this summer we seek to fill a missing link in her research by showing how the measles vaccine affects schooling in the U.S.

Our focus this summer is on Texas because it has a large amount of data available both on disease and education. Additionally, Texas being such a populous state is ideal because we have a wide range of counties, from very urban to very rural, that allows us to exploit variation in incidence rates of disease and population densities. We read through the medical literature on measles and found that it proves to be a unique disease to study because it is universal and causes “immune amnesia”. Universal means practically everyone will contract it at some point in their childhoods before the vaccine introduction. Immune amnesia means that when children contract measles not only do they get sick but their bodies lose the antibodies to other infectious diseases which then take about three to five years to rebuild. Therefore, once children have measles they are more likely to get sicker throughout their childhoods, which we would hypothesize has an impact on educational attainment. 

Our work has included manually entering the data for the disease counts for a myriad of illnesses in every county in Texas from 1951 to 1977, as well as the attendance and related education data for the individual school districts from 1960 to 1971. We used Stata software to clean our data and run descriptive statistics. We also created maps and figures that highlighted case counts over time. Initially, we expected measles cases to experience an immediate drop-off when the vaccine was licensed but our data showed that a drop-off did not occur until a few years after the licensing. From there we worked on piecing together a puzzle of the history of the Texas vaccine rollout to figure out why this is. We sorted through hundreds of newspaper clippings, TV broadcast scripts, video footage, medical journals, and more to learn about who had access to the vaccine and when. 

With all the information we have gathered this summer, we plan on writing an article about the measles vaccine rollout in Texas. Meanwhile, having uncovered Texas’ complicated vaccination timeline, we are working towards a clearer picture of before and after periods so that we can run event studies and continue our statistical analysis. We hope our research can add to a story not just about the importance of vaccines but also about the need for large-scale federal policy to ensure the implementation of immunization efforts and healthcare as a whole.