Drinking Water Contamination and Birth Outcomes
Listen to a podcast episode about this work. Read our NBER working paper on Hazardous Waste Clean-Ups. Hazardous Waste Clean-Upsįocusing on cleanups of hazardous waste sites under the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA), this study examines water quality, housing prices, & infant health after the cleanups to evaluate the program. This suggests that the positive health effects of the associated pollution reductions are not salient to home buyers, or may be offset by other negative externalities associated with the construction projects. We find a limited response of house prices to nearby construction projects.
We use roadway construction projects to identify exogenous shocks to local traffic trends. Using a quasi-experimental design, this study focuses on how changes in air quality through reductions in traffic congestion affect housing prices. Health Effects Institute (HEI): Housing Price Changes in Response to Congestion Projects We use difference-in-difference methods to estimate the effect of widening and intersection improvements on congestion and air pollution. We create a dataset of construction projects in Texas and link them to data on air pollution and three variables operationalizing congestion: average annual daily traffic (AADT), AADT per lane, and delay in hours. The relationship between roadway construction and congestion is of policy importance, but few studies examine it using large samples of construction projects and detailed traffic and air pollution data. Traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) is an established health hazard, and roadway construction has the potential to affect TRAP by relieving congestion. Health Effects Institute (HEI): Changes in Traffic Congestion and Air Pollution Due to Major Roadway Infrastructure Improvements Existing research explores the cost associated with roadway volume and determinants of volume such as tolling, but this paper is the first to estimate the effect of construction projects that reduce roadway congestion (measured as both volume and delay) on infant health. This paper evaluates the overall and distributional health effects of highway infrastructure investments to reduce traffic congestion on infant health for mothers living near these roadways. While billions of dollars are spent each year on highway infrastructure investments to reduce traffic congestion (i.e., improvement projects), there is limited evidence evaluating the success of these projects with respect to changing exposure to traffic-related air pollution for communities nearby. Health Effects Institute (HEI): Congestion, Highway Improvement Projects, and Infant Health We aim to determine how VMT change contributes to change in NO2, O3, and PM2.5 concentrations and at what spatial scale these changes occur. In this analysis, we use proprietary smartphone sensing data with VMT calculations to examine the impact of VMT on ambient air pollution during the decline in vehicle usage from the COVID-19 shutdown. However, the relationship between VMT and ambient air pollution is not fully understood.
Transportation planners calculate vehicle miles traveled (VMT) to forecast roadway usage and inform policy decisions. Associations Between Vehicle Miles Traveled and Ambient Air Pollution at Regulatory Monitoring Sites: A Natural Experiment Using the COVID-19 Shutdown
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