TY - JOUR AU - Clay,Karen AU - Troesken,Werner AU - Haines,Michael TI - Lead Pipes and Child Mortality JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 12603 PY - 2006 Y2 - October 2006 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12603 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12603.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Karen Clay Heinz College Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Tel: 412/268-4197 Fax: 412/268-7357 E-Mail: kclay@andrew.cmu.edu Werner Troesken Department of Economics University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Tel: 412/648-2823 Fax: 412/648-9074 E-Mail: troesken@pitt.edu Michael R. Haines Department of Economics, 217 Persson Hall Colgate University 13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346 Tel: 315/228-7536 Fax: 315/228-7033 E-Mail: MHAINES@MAIL.COLGATE.EDU AB - Beginning around 1880, public health issues and engineering advances spurred the installation of city water and sewer systems. As part of this growth, many cities chose to use lead service pipes to connect residences to city water systems. This choice had negative consequences for child mortality, although the consequences were often hard to observe amid the overall falling death rates. This paper uses national data from the public use sample of the 1900 Census of Population and data on city use of lead pipes in 1897 to estimate the effect of lead pipes on child mortality. In 1900, 29 percent of the married women in the United States who had given birth to at least one child and were age forty-five or younger lived in locations where lead service pipes were used to deliver water. Because the effect of lead pipes depended on the acidity and hardness of the water, much of the negative effect was concentrated on the densely populated eastern seaboard. In the full sample, women who lived on the eastern seaboard in cities with lead pipes experienced increased child mortality of 9.3 percent relative to the sample average. These estimates suggest that the number of child deaths attributable to the use of lead pipes numbered in the tens of thousands. Many surviving children may have experienced substantial IQ impairment as a result of lead exposure. The tragedy is that lead problems were avoidable, particularly once data became available on the toxicity of lead. These findings have implications for current policy and events. ER -