Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men

NBER Working Paper No. 22323

Issued in June 2016, Revised in June 2017

NBER Program(s):Children, Development of the American Economy



For forty years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male passively monitored hundreds of adult black males with syphilis despite the availability of effective treatment. The study’s methods have become synonymous with exploitation and mistreatment by the medical profession. To identify the study’s effects on the behavior and health of older black men, we use an interacted difference-in-difference-in-differences model, comparing older black men to other demographic groups, before and after the Tuskegee revelation, in varying proximity to the study’s victims. We find that the disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men. Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.5 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men and 25% of the gap between black men and women.

A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the August 2016 NBER Digest. You can sign up to receive the NBER Digest by email.



Supplementary materials for this paper:



Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w22323

Published: Marcella Alsan & Marianne Wanamaker, 2018. "Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men*," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 133(1), pages 407-455. citation courtesy of

Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these: