Events
Brown Bag Seminar: Nina Brooks
Nina Brooks of UM-SEAS joins us Nov. 16 to present:
Air Pollution and Schools: Evidence from Government Schools in Delhi
While the health consequences of air pollution are well established, its implications for human capital formation—and the labor supply decisions that underpin it—remain less understood, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. We address this gap by assembling a novel dataset linking daily PM2.5 concentrations with student and teacher attendance and yearly grade-level passing rates for high-school exit exams across government schools in Delhi, the capital of India and one of the world’s most polluted cities. Because school attendance is a critical input into human capital accumulation, disruptions caused by pollution can have lasting consequences for learning, earnings, and intergenerational mobility. Leveraging daily spatial variation in pollution exposure and controlling for weather, school fixed effects, and seasonality, we examine how air pollution shapes the attendance of both students and the teachers responsible for their instruction. We find that a 10 ug/m3 increase in PM2.5 one day before leads to a 0.1 percentage point increase in teacher absenteeism with no comparable effects for students. For schools in the 95th percentile of the pollution distribution, we find that absenteeism increases by 1.4 percentage points for staff and 1.8 students. By documenting these impacts in a large, public school system where chronic absenteeism remains a persistent challenge, and in an extremely high pollution context, our study advances the literature on the environmental determinants of human capital formation in low- and middle-income countries.
Nina Brooks is an Assistant Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Her research seeks to document how climate change and air pollution threaten human health and well-being in the Global South and identify real-world, actionable climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.
PSC’s Brown Bag seminar series typically convenes Mondays at noon, at ISR Thompson Room 1430, and on Zoom.
https://umich.zoom.us/j/954186
Meeting ID: 954 1861 0585
Passcode: 818420
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Meeting ID: 954 1861 0585
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Meeting ID: 954 1861 0585
Passcode: 818420