Can Pollution Cause Poverty? The Effects of Pollution on Educational, Health and Economic Outcomes

Claudia Persico

No 12965, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Although industrial plants, known as Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) sites, exist in every major city of the United States releasing billions of pounds of toxic substances annually, there is little evidence about how these pollutants might harm child development and children's long run outcomes. Using the detailed geocoded data that follows national representative cohorts of children born to the NLSY respondents over time with detailed information on families, locations, health, disability and labor market outcomes, I compare siblings who were gestating before versus after a TRI site opened or closed within one mile of their home. In other words, I compare siblings in the same family whose family does not move between births where one or more child was exposed to TRI pollution during gestation and other siblings were not exposed because the plant opened or closed in between the conceptions of different children in the same family. I find that children who were exposed prenatally to TRI pollution have lower wages, are more likely to be in poverty as adults, have fewer years of completed education, are less likely to graduate high school, and are more likely to have a disability.

Keywords: child health; academic achievement; air pollution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 I24 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12965.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Can Pollution Cause Poverty? The Effects of Pollution on Educational, Health and Economic Outcomes (2022)
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:iza:izadps:dp12965

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().