Life after Lead: Effects of Early Interventions for Children Exposed to Lead

The Long-Run Spillover Effects of Pollution: How Exposure to Lead Affects Everyone in the Classroom

“…Lead remediation efforts have shown positive impacts on children's blood lead levels and test scores (Sorensen et al 2019). In addition, Billings and Schnepel (2018) show that offering early interventions for lead poisoned children improves their outcomes. Thus, early interventions might help both lead poisoned children and their peers.…”

Hassles and Environmental Health Screenings

“…Parents' perceived screening benefits depend on several factors, including information about exposure risk, degree of risk aversion, degree of altruism towards the child, 7 beliefs about treatment costs and feasibility (which may correlate with home-ownership) as well as recovery 6 Case management occurs mostly at home and includes nutritional education and information about reducing exposure in the home, a home inspection, and referral to lead remediation services, which are generally subsidized for low-income households. Billings & Schnepel (2018) show that such case management fully reverses lead poisoning damages in a sample of North Carolina children. 7 The evidence on how much parents value reductions in their children's health risk relative to reductions in their own risk is mixed (see for example, Gerking & Dickie 2013, Gerking et al 2014 probability, 8 and additional benefits from visiting the doctor, such as having a physical examination or an immunization shot.…”

“…Moreover, these children are screened six days earlier, and are younger when their highest BLL is recorded (Columns 2-3). Early detection may improve long-term outcomes by reducing exposure (Billings & Schnepel 2018). Yet, Column 4 finds no evidence that proximity to providers is associated with higher HUD-funded remediation activity at a child's home within three years of birth.…”

A Thousand Cuts: Cumulative Lead Exposure Reduces Academic Achievement

“…Prior research suggests this amount of lead emissions within a county in a single year increases county-level lead poisoning rates that year by approximately 1 percent(Hollingsworth and Rudik, 2021).9 For example, parental income or education is nearly impossible to change, and meaningfully decreasing class size requires regular salary payments to newly hired teachers. Hiring more teachers may also decrease average teaching quality, offsetting some of the gains from smaller class size.10 Prior research has found that remediation of lead-contaminated homes improves test scores(Billings and Schnepel, 2018;Sorensen et al, 2019).…”