By Austin Frakt
...The 1970 amendment to the Clean Air Act (click here) significantly reduced air pollution in certain areas, offering a research opportunity. A study published last year in the Journal of Political Economy looked at the level of pollution experienced by children born in each year between 1969 and 1974, and also their earnings 30 or more years later. The study found that exposure to lower levels of pollution in their birth years led to higher earnings by age 30 and at least $4,300 more over their lifetimes, or $6.5 billion per affected cohort.
Another study, by authors from Northwestern and the University of Florida, examined the test scores of 13,000 children born in Florida between 1994 and 2002, when the E.P.A. cleaned up many Superfund sites.
The children were all in families with one child born before and one after a nearby Superfund site cleanup. That meant one child was exposed, in utero, to a higher level of environmental toxicity than the other. The study found that children conceived within two miles of a Superfund site before it was cleaned up had lower elementary school standardized test scores than the siblings born later. They were also 40 percent more likely to repeat a grade; 6.6 percentage points more likely to be suspended from school; and 10 percentage points more likely to be diagnosed with a cognitive disability.
But it doesn’t take decades to see pollution’s effect. One study of the 39 largest school districts in Texas found that when carbon monoxide levels were higher, children were more likely to be absent from school. Janet Currie, a Princeton economist, was an author of the study....
