What Doesn't Kill you Makes you Weaker: Prenatal Pollution Exposure and Educational Outcomes

Nicholas Sanders

No 10-019, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: I examine the impact of prenatal suspended particulate pollution on educational outcomes, using ambient total suspended particulates (TSPs) as a measure of particulate exposure and standardized test scores of exposed individuals as a measure of educational achievement. I focus on individuals born between 1979 and 1985 to exploit the shock of the industrial recession of the early 1980s. This variation helps separate the causal effects of pollution reduction from general time trends. Considering the 7-year time period as a whole yields statistically insignificant results, but focusing on the 3-year period around the recession (1981-1983) yields negative and statistically significant results, suggesting that the relationship is subtle enough to require large-scale changes to be detectable. My findings suggest a standard deviation decrease in the mean pollution level in a student’s year of birth is associated with 1.87% of a standard deviation increase in test scores in high school. I also employ an instrumental variables strategy, using changes in relative manufacturing employment driven by the recession as an instrument for TSP levels. Instrumental variables results are approximately 3.7 times the size of the OLS results, suggesting the potential presence of measurement error in ambient pollution. Results are robust to the inclusion of school fixed effects, year of birth and year of test fixed effects, and various demographic and economic covariates. I also investigate the potential bias sources of migration and selection into motherhood, and show these are unlikely to explain my results.

Keywords: motherhood; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 Q51 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/10-019.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www-siepr.stanford.edu:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker: Prenatal Pollution Exposure and Educational Outcomes (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sip:dpaper:10-019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Shor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).