Working Paper: NBER ID: w14196
Authors: Janet Currie; Matthew J. Neidell; Johannes Schmieder
Abstract: We examine the impact of three "criteria" air pollutants on infant health in New Jersey in the 1990s by combining information about mother's residential location from birth certificates with information from air quality monitors. In addition to large sample size, our work offers three important innovations: First, because we know the exact addresses of mothers, we select those mothers closest to air monitors to ensure a more accurate measure of air quality. Second, since we follow mothers over time, we control for unobserved characteristics of mothers using maternal fixed effects. Third, we examine interactions of air pollution with smoking and other predictors of poor infant health outcomes. We find consistently negative effects of exposure to pollution, especially carbon monoxide, both during and after birth. The effects are considerably larger for smokers than for nonsmokers as well as for older mothers. Since automobiles are the main source of carbon monoxide emissions, our results have important implications for regulation of automobile emissions.
Keywords: Air Pollution; Infant Health; Carbon Monoxide; New Jersey
JEL Codes: I12; Q53
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| CO exposure during last trimester (J89) | low birth weight (J13) |
| CO exposure during last trimester (J89) | average birth weight (J19) |
| CO exposure in first two weeks after birth (J13) | infant mortality (J13) |
| smoking mothers (I12) | CO effects on infant health (I14) |
| maternal characteristics (age, smoking) (J13) | CO effects on infant health (I14) |