We study how ambient lead exposure impacts learning in elementary school by leveraging a natural experiment where a large national automotive racing organization switched from leaded to unleaded fuel. We find increased levels and duration of exposure to lead negatively affect academic...

Using county-level Vital Statistics of the United States data from 1974-2009, we employ a differences-in-differences framework comparing influenza mortality rates in Super Bowl-participating counties to non-participants. Having a local team in the Super Bowl causes an 18% increase in influenza...

In 1998, a number of polluting industries, including fossil fuel power plants, were added to the list of firms publicly reporting pollution releases in the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). This caused a large increase in reported toxic pollution, and a corresponding decrease in median housing...

We use data from the National Incidence-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to examine how the probability of getting caught when committing a crime, proxied by ambient daylight, impacts criminal activity. We exploit the existence of daylight saving time (DST) to provide within-hour exogenous shockto...

Though over 90 percent of benefits from environmental quality improvements are attributed to long-term exposure, nearly all quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of pollution on health exploits changes in short-term exposure. Quantifying long-run exposure impacts requires a lasting,...

Fetal health is an important consideration in the formation of health-based policy. However, a complete census of true fetal deaths is impossible to obtain. We present the gender ratio of live births as an under-exploited metric of fetal health and apply it to examine the effects of air quality...

Since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAAA), atmospheric concentration of local pollutants has fallen drastically. A natural question is whether further reductions will yield additional health benefits. We further this research by addressing two related research questions: (1) what is the...