Dr. David Simon, University of Connecticut
Seminar Title: "The Impact of Traffic Pollution on Child Academic Outcomes"
Abstract:
A growing literature looks at the impact of traffic pollution on a range of health outcomes such as respiratory health, older adult mortality, infant mortality and birthweight. However, few studies look at the role of traffic pollution on human capital accumulation in childhood. In the United States, 4.4 million students attend a school that is within 500 feet of a major highway: implying a potentially large level of pollution exposure based on school location. We investigate this using a unique longitudinal dataset on the population of children attending public school in Florida. By following students overtime, and only looking at schools that are near major roads, we use the move to/from a school whose prevailing winds place it downwind of a road as a plausibly exogenous shock to pollution exposure. Using models that include student, zip code, and grade fixed effects implies we effectively compare students who change “downwind” status to those who progress through the Florida school system and remain in the same type of school. In preliminary results we find that going to school downwind of a major road is associated with a 0.16 of a standard deviation decline in reading scores and a 0.032 decline in math scores. Similarly, a balancing test shows that being downwind is not systematically related to being in a school composed of lower SES status students, and an event study shows that the movers do not have a decreasing trend in test scores before their move. Results are also robust to only using the “policy” induced move of changing schools due to graduating to middle school or high school. Future work plans to use the rich data on home and school location to understand the relative importance of short term versus accumulated effects of pollution exposure.
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
3:00pm - 4:00pm
W.B. Young Building, room 132
View the full Spring 2018 ARE Seminar Schedule
For more information, contact: Tatiana Andreyeva at tatiana.andreyeva@uconn.edu