Pollution, Ability, and Gender-Specific Responses to Shocks

Teresa Molina

No 1905, CINCH Working Paper Series from Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, Competent in Competition and Health

Abstract: This paper explores how labor market conditions drive gender differences in the human capital decisions of men and women, focusing on how their schooling decisions respond to an exogenous change in cognitive ability. Using data from Mexico, I begin by documenting that in utero exposure to air pollution leads to lower cognitive ability in adulthood for both men and women. I then explore how male and female schooling decisions respond differentially to this cognitive shock: for women only, pollution exposure leads to reduced educational attainment and income. I show that two labor market features are fully responsible for this gender difference: (1) women sort into white-collar occupations at higher rates, and (2) schooling and ability are more complementary in white-collar than blue-collar occupations.

Keywords: gender; occupational choice; early life; pollution; education; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I26 J24 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 94 pages
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-gen
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cinch.uni-due.de/fileadmin/content/researc ... cinch-WP-2019-05.pdf First version, 2019 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
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:duh:wpaper:1905

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CINCH Working Paper Series from Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, Competent in Competition and Health Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benjamin Karas ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).