David Benatia (HEC Montreal, CREST-ENSAE)

Title : Air Pollution and Children’s Health Inequalities.

Abstract:
This paper examines the differential impacts of early childhood exposure to air pollution on children's health care use across parental income groups using French administrative data. We isolate a quasi-experimental air pollution shock based on variations in local thermal inversion exposure between birth cohorts within municipalities. We provide causal evidence that short-term increases in air pollution exposure early in life affect the likelihood of emergency admissions and medication use related to respiratory problems in young children.  We uncover large air pollution-related health inequalities between children by  estimating the treatment effect heterogeneity with machine learning. We find that the health effects are concentrated in about 10\% of the infant population, who are not necessarily the most exposed. These infants are mainly characterized  by a combination of poor health indicators at birth but also by lower parental income.

Download slides