Air Quality and Early-Life Mortality: Evidence from Indonesia's Wildfires

Seema Jayachandran

NBER Working Paper No. 14011
Issued in May 2008
NBER Program(s):   CH   HC   HE

Smoke from massive wildfires blanketed Indonesia in late 1997. This paper examines the impact this air pollution (particulate matter) had on fetal, infant, and child mortality. Exploiting the sharp timing and spatial patterns of the pollution and inferring deaths from "missing children" in the 2000 Indonesian Census, I find that the pollution led to 15,600 missing children in Indonesia (1.2% of the affected birth cohorts). Prenatal exposure to pollution largely drives the result. The effect size is much larger in poorer areas, suggesting that differential effects of pollution contribute to the socioeconomic gradient in health.

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Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w14011

Published: ema Jayachandran, 2009. "Air Quality and Early-Life Mortality: Evidence from Indonesia’s Wildfires," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 44(4). citation courtesy of

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