Evidence shows that pollution exposure early in life is detrimental to near-term health, and an increasing body of evidence suggests that early-childhood health influences health and human capital outcomes later in life. This article reviews the economic research that brings these two...

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,...

We investigate the effect of pollution on worker productivity in the service sector by focusing on two call centers in China. Using precise measures of each worker's daily output linked to daily measures of pollution and meteorology, we find that higher levels of air pollution decrease worker...

A pervasive problem in the literature on the health costs of pollution is that optimizing individuals may compensate for increases in pollution by reducing their exposure to protect their health. This implies that estimates of the health effects of pollution may vastly understate the full...

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. Environmental protection is typically cast as a tax on the labor market and the economy in general. Since a large body of evidence links...

"An NBER digest for this paper is available.The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. In this paper, we examine the impact of poor water quality on avoidance behavior by...