Understanding the impact of HIV on economic outcomes is vital for understanding whether poor health can help explain why some countries grow while others stagnate. Estimating this
relationship is problematic, as it is difficult to determine whether poverty causes HIV, or HIV causes poverty. This paper uses a household level dataset that spans ten countries and exploits
the recent finding that circumcision significantly reduces the probability of contracting HIV to identify random variation in HIV prevalence and estimate the impact of HIV on five labor market outcomes.