Air pollution and infant health: Lessons from New Jersey

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. Our work offers three important innovations: First, we use the exact addresses of mothers to select those closest to air monitors to improve the accuracy of air quality exposure. Second, we include maternal fixed effects to control for unobserved characteristics of mothers. Third, we examine interactions of air pollution with smoking and other risk factors for poor infant health outcomes. We find consistently negative effects of exposure to carbon monoxide, both during and after birth, with effects considerably larger for smokers and older mothers. Since automobiles are the main source of carbon monoxide emissions, our results have important implications for regulation of automobile emissions.The primary goal of pollution abatement is to protect human health, but there is still much debate about the specific health effects. This paper addresses this issue by examining the impact of air pollution on infant health in New Jersey over the 1990s. Policy makers and the public are highly motivated to protect these most vulnerable members of society. There is increasing evidence of long-term effects of poor infant health on future outcomes; for example, low birth weight has been linked to future health problems and lower educational attainment (see Currie (2008) for a summary of this research). Studying infants also overcomes several empirical challenges because, unlike adult diseases that may reflect pollution exposure that occurred many years ago, the link between cause and effect is more immediate.Our analysis improves upon much of the previous research by improving the assignment of pollution exposure from air quality monitors to individuals. Most observational analyses that assess the impact of air pollution on health assign exposure to pollution by either approximating the individual's location as the centroid of a geographic area or computing average pollution levels within the geographic area. In our data we know the exact addresses of mothers, enabling us to improve on the assignment of pollution exposure.Despite this improvement in pollution measurement, we must still confront the problem that air pollution is not randomly assigned, making potential confounding a major concern. Since air quality is capitalized into housing prices (Chay and Greenstone, 2003) families with higher incomes or preferences for cleaner air are likely to sort into locations with better air quality, and failure to account for this will lead to overestimates of the effects of pollution. Alternatively, pollution levels are higher in urban areas where there are often more educated individuals with better access to health care, which can cause underestimates of the effects of * We are grateful for funding under NIH grant R21 HD055613-01. All opinions and any errors are our own. We would also like to thank

Season of birth and subclinical psychosis: Systematic review and meta-analysis of new and existing data

“…Some mechanisms have been proposed to explain how SOB affects early neurodevelopmental trajectories, including pollution, eating patterns, vitamin D deficits, maternal infections and temperature changes (Currie, Neidell, & Schmieder, 2009;Eyles, Burne, & McGrath, 2013;Schwartz, 2011;Siega-Riz, Savitz, Zeisel, Thorp, & Herring, 2004). In effect, recent epidemiological research has pointed out that seasonality exerts a strong influence on fetal features such as gestation length and birth weight, and that these associations may markedly be compelled by maternal influenza and pregnancy weight gain (Currie et al, 2013).…”

Genes, Education, and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

“…18 Even birth weight, another proxy of innate endowments that has been used in prior literature is not immune to this critique as it reflects in utero investments, e.g., mother's smoking behavior (Lien and Evans, 2005), exposure to pollutants (Currie, Neidell, and Schmieder, 2009) stress during pregnancy (Camacho, 2008;Currie and Rossin-Slater, 2013) or mothers' own health (Costa, 1998). See also Aizer and Currie (2014) for a recent discussion.…”

Survival to Adulthood and the Growth Drag of Pollution

“…Currie and Neidell (2005) report that reductions in carbon monoxide during the 90s saved around 1000 infant lifes in California. Currie, Neidell, and Schmieder (2009) find that a one-unit change in mean carbon monoxide during the first two weeks after birth increases the risk of infant mortality by 2.5 %. Moreover, the fifteen-year decline in CO from 1989 to 2003 translates into $720 million in lifetime earnings from improvements in birth weight and $2.2 billion from the reduction in infant mortality for the 2003 US birth cohort.…”

“…Recent empirical findings (Chay and Greenstone, 2003;Currie and Neidell, 2005;Currie, et al, 2009;Ebenstein, 2012) support convincingly the link between exposure to pollustate of a country's technology and pollution controls is an important determinant of particulate matter concentrations (see World Bank Indicators, 2013). 5 In fact pollution affects both conception and fetal deaths (Buck Louis et al, 2009;Sanders and Stoecker, 2011).…”