This study measures the monetary value households place on preventing malaria in Tigray, Ethiopia. We estimate a household demand function for a hypothetical malaria vaccine and calculate willingness to pay to prevent malaria as the area beneath this demand function to the left of household size. Willingness to pay is contrasted with the traditional costs of illness--the medical costs and time lost due to malaria. Our results indicate that the value of preventing malaria with vaccines is about

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... 6 USD per household per year or about 15 percent of imputed annual household income. This is, on average, about two or three times the expected household cost of illness. While the benefits from preventing malaria are large, the fact that vaccine demand is price inelastic suggests that it will be difficult to achieve significant market penetration unless the vaccine is subsidized. Similar results are obtained for insecticide-treated bednets. Our estimates of household demand functions for bednets suggest that at a price that might permit cost recovery (6 USD per bednet), only one-third of the population of a 200-person village would sleep under bednets. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS