IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/duh/wpaper/1905.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pollution, Ability, and Gender-Specific Responses to Shocks

Author

Listed:
  • Teresa Molina

    (University of Hawaii at Manoa Department of Economics)

Abstract

This paper explores how labor market conditions drive gender differences in the human capital decisions of men and women, focusing on how their schooling decisions respond to an exogenous change in cognitive ability. Using data from Mexico, I begin by documenting that in utero exposure to air pollution leads to lower cognitive ability in adulthood for both men and women. I then explore how male and female schooling decisions respond differentially to this cognitive shock: for women only, pollution exposure leads to reduced educational attainment and income. I show that two labor market features are fully responsible for this gender difference: (1) women sort into white-collar occupations at higher rates, and (2) schooling and ability are more complementary in white-collar than blue-collar occupations.

Suggested Citation

  • Teresa Molina, 2019. "Pollution, Ability, and Gender-Specific Responses to Shocks," CINCH Working Paper Series 1905, Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, Competent in Competition and Health.
    • Handle: RePEc:duh:wpaper:1905
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cinch.uni-due.de/fileadmin/content/research/workingpaper/cinch-WP-2019-05.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2019
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chen, Xi & Zhang, Xiaobo & Zhang, Xin, 2017. "Smog in Our Brains: Gender Differences in the Impact of Exposure to Air Pollution on Cognitive Performance," IZA Discussion Papers 10628, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Nicholas W Papageorge & Kevin Thom, 2020. "Genes, Education, and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 18(3), pages 1351-1399.
    3. Rashesh Shrestha, 2019. "Early Life Exposure to Air Pollution, Cognitive Development, and Labor Market Outcome," Asian Economic Papers, MIT Press, vol. 18(2), pages 77-95, Summer.
    4. Achyuta Adhvaryu & Steven Bednar & Teresa Molina & Quynh Nguyen & Anant Nyshadham, 2020. "When It Rains It Pours: The Long-Run Economic Impacts of Salt Iodization in the United States," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(2), pages 395-407, May.
    5. Yamada,Takahiro & Yamada,Hiroyuki & Mani,Muthukumara S., 2021. "The Causal Effects of Long-Term PM2.5 Exposure on COVID-19 in India," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9543, The World Bank.
    6. Fischer, Martin & Karlsson, Martin & Prodromidis, Nikolaos, 2021. "Long‐term Effects of Hospital Deliveries," CINCH Working Paper Series (since 2020) 74712, Duisburg-Essen University Library, DuEPublico.
    7. Joan Calzada & Meritxell Gisbert & Bernard Moscoso, 2021. "The hidden cost of bananas: pesticide effects on newborns’ health," UB School of Economics Working Papers 2021/405, University of Barcelona School of Economics.
    8. Kronenberg, Christoph, 2020. "New(spaper) Evidence of a Reduction in Suicide Mentions during the 19th‐century US Gold Rush," CINCH Working Paper Series (since 2020) 73382, Duisburg-Essen University Library, DuEPublico.
    9. Chen, Xi & Zhang, Xiaobo & Zhang, Xin, 2017. "Smog in our brains: Gender differences in the impact of exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance in China," IFPRI discussion papers 1619, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    10. Shuai Chen & Paulina Oliva & Peng Zhang, 2017. "The Effect of Air Pollution on Migration: Evidence from China," NBER Working Papers 24036, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    gender; occupational choice; early life; pollution; education; Mexico;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I26 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Returns to Education
    • Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:duh:wpaper:1905. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Benjamin Karas (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cinchde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.