“Every Breath You Take | Every Dollar You’ll Make:The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970″AbstractThis paper examines the long-term impacts of in-utero andearly childhood exposure to ambient air pollution on adult labor market
outcomes. We take advantage of a new administrative data set that is uniquely
suited for addressing this question because it combines information on
individuals’ quarterly earnings together with their counties and dates of
birth. We use the sharp changes in ambient air pollution concentrations driven
by the implementation of the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments as a source of
identifying variation, and we compare cohorts born in counties that experienced
large changes in total suspended particulate (TSP) exposure to cohorts born in
counties that had minimal or no changes. We find a significant relationship
between TSP exposure in the year of birth and adult labor market outcomes. A 10
unit decrease in TSP in the year of birth is associated with a 1 percent
increase in annual earnings for workers aged 29-31. Most, but not all, of this
effect is driven by an increase in labor force participation. In present value,
the gains from being born into a county affected by the 1970 Clean Air Act
amount to about $4,300 in lifetime income for the 1.5 million individuals born
into these counties each year.http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/rwalker/research/CAAlongtermHealth.pdf About the Speaker:Reed
Walker is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at the
University of California – Berkeley. After his fellowship with the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation, he will join the faculty at the University of California –
Berkeley’s Haas School of Business as an assistant professor in Business and
Public Policy. He received his PhD in economics from Columbia University in
2012. His research explores the social costs of environmental externalities
such as air pollution and how existing regulations to limit these externalities
contribute to distortions in various product markets.
