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The impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on test scores in Iran

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Abstract

Air pollution in urban centers has become a key public concern around the world. Apart from its adverse health effects, air pollution could impact less visible outcomes like cognitive performance. Standardized tests are a fixture of all education settings that are susceptible to pollution shocks because they require high cognitive function. Given that test scores are widely used as signals by parents, employers, and education institutions, pollution shocks could render tests unfair and unreliable. In this paper, we combine pollution data with test scores from a large testing institution in Iran between 2012 and 2017 to quantify the impact of short-term exposure to air pollution on test performance. We use visibility as an instrument for exposure to PM10 and PM2.5 on the exam day in a student fixed effects specification to study the impact of PM. We find that a one standard deviation increase in PM10 and PM2.5 is respectively associated with 0.047 and 0.029 of a standard deviation decrease in test scores. The effect is larger for males and analytical subjects. The results are robust to inclusion of other pollutants and several specification checks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Naser Amanzadeh, Mohammad Vesal & Seyed Farshad Fatemi Ardestani

Authors
  1. Naser Amanzadeh
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  2. Mohammad Vesal
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  3. Seyed Farshad Fatemi Ardestani
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Correspondence to Mohammad Vesal.

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We would like to thank numerous seminar participants in IIEA 2019, SEEPS 2019, Waseda University and Sharif WIP Seminars for useful comments. We would like to especially thank the editor and three anonymous referees for extremely useful comments and suggestions. We would like to thank the testing institution, which requested to remain anonymous, for providing the test score data. The Department of Environment, Tehran and Mashhad Municipalities for providing pollution data. All remaining errors are ours.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 11 Robustness regressions: Use 4, 6, 12, 18, and 24-h pollution measurements
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Table 12 First stage of IV estimates in Tables 3 and 4
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Table 13 Reduced form estimates of regressing test scores on visibility (our instrument)
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Table 14 Results after restricting the data to observations without any missing pollutants
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Table 15 Heterogeneity of pollution impact across majors
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Amanzadeh, N., Vesal, M. & Ardestani, S.F.F. The impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on test scores in Iran. Popul Environ 41, 253–285 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-019-00335-4

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