Quiet please! Adverse effects of noise on child development

Noise pollution is detrimental to health and to the cognitive development of children. This is not only true for extreme levels of noise in the neighborhood of an airport but also for traffic noise in urban areas. Using a census of preschool children, we show that children exposed to intensive traffic noise significantly fall behind in terms of school readiness. Being exposed to an additional 10 dB(A) counteracts the benefits to school readiness from about 3 months of kindergarten. We contribute to the literature and the policy debate on noise reduction by working with administrative data and focusing on everyday exposure to noise. The proposed method is easily applied to other regions. We assess the public costs of different abatement instruments and perform a cost-benefit analysis accordingly. It turns out that the commonly used abatement measures—e.g., quiet pavement or noise protection walls in densely populated areas of about 3,000 to 5,000 inhabitants per km2—are potentially cost efficient, even under a conservative assessment of the benefits.