TY  - JOUR
AU  - Currie,Janet
AU  - Neidell,Matthew J.
AU  - Schmieder,Johannes
TI  - Air Pollution and Infant Health: Lessons from New Jersey
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14196
PY  - 2008
Y2  - July 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14196
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14196.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Janet Currie
Princeton University
316 Wallace Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609-258-7393
Fax: 609-258-5974
E-Mail: jcurrie@princeton.edu

Matthew J. Neidell
Department of Health Policy and Management
Columbia University
600 W 168th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10032
Tel: 212/342-4522
Fax: 212/305-3405
E-Mail: mn2191@columbia.edu

Johannes Schmieder
Department of Economics
Boston University
270 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215
Tel: (617)299-9841
E-Mail: johannes.schmieder@gmail.com
AB  - We examine the impact of three "criteria" air pollutants on infant health in New Jersey in the 1990s by combining information about mother's residential location from birth certificates with information from air quality monitors.   In addition to large sample size, our work offers three important innovations:  First, because we know the exact addresses of mothers, we select those mothers closest to air monitors to ensure a more accurate measure of air quality.   Second, since we follow mothers over time, we control for unobserved characteristics of mothers using maternal fixed effects.  Third, we examine interactions of air pollution with smoking and other predictors of poor infant health outcomes.  We find consistently negative effects of exposure to pollution, especially carbon monoxide, both during and after birth.  The effects are considerably larger for smokers than for nonsmokers as well as for older mothers.  Since automobiles are the main source of carbon monoxide emissions, our results have important implications for regulation of automobile emissions.
ER  -