Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A growing literature looks at the impact of traffic pollution on a range of health outcomes such as respiratory health, older adult mortality, and infant mortality and birthweight. One of the implications of the documented influence of pollution on health is that it could adversely affect human capital accumulation in childhood. However, due to data limitations, few studies look at the relationship between traffic and childhood outcomes such as test scores and school attendance. We use a unique longitudinal dataset on the population of children attending school in a large anonymous county in Florida. Our data contains information on both the location of the school, co-resident sibling pairs, and home address. We overcome the confounding influence of omitted variables related to pollution exposure by comparing schools that are down wind of the highway with observationally similar neighboring schools that are upwind on the same highways segment. We document the influence of wind direction relative to highway location on pollution and test scores. Future work plans to use the rich data on home and school location to understand the relative importance of short term versus accumulated effects of pollution exposure.