Can Iron-Fortified Salt Control Anemia? Evidence from Two Experiments in Rural Bihar

Banerjee and Duflo are from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Barnhardt is from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. For financial support, we thank the U.K. Department for International Development, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (P01AG005842), the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the MIT Department of Economics. For dedicated research assistance we are grateful to the team at J-PAL, including Urmi Bhattacharya, Shruti Bhimsaria, Anna George, Dwijo Goswami, Radhika Jain, Seema Kacker, Sweta Kumari, Francine Loza, Bastien Michel, Krutika Ravishankar, Prianthi Roy, Achill Rudolph, Laura Stilwell, Srinivasan Vasudevan, Niloufer Taber, Micah Villareal and dozens of survey specialists. Dr. Vandana Sharma provided medical expertise. Our partners at Tata Chemicals Limited made the distribution of DFS possible in rural Bihar. The National Institute of Nutrition (Hyderabad) provided ongoing assistance with the verification of iron and iodine content in salt samples. These studies can be found in the AEA RCT Registry (AEARCTR-0000010, AEARCTR-0000013). We thank Nel Druce for detailed comments on a DFID report that underlies the analysis in this paper. All errors are our own and the paper does not represent the views of DFID or any other organization. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.