Working Papers

Clean Rides, Healthy Lives: The Impact of Electric Vehicle Adoption on Air Quality and Infant Health (NBER Working Paper No. 34278) (with J. Currie, B. Dursun, & E. Tekin) [Link]

This paper provides the first nationwide evidence on how electric vehicle (EV) adoption has improved both air quality and child health. We assemble a rich dataset from 2010–2021 that links county-level EV registrations to measures of air pollution, birth outcomes, and emergency department visits. The endogeneity of EV adoption is addressed using two complementary strategies: Two-way fixed effects and instrumental variables (IV).  The IV exploits the staggered rollout of Alternative Fuel Corridors as a source of exogenous variation in charging infrastructure that affected EV adoption. The estimates show that greater EV penetration significantly reduces nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a key pollutant linked to vehicular emissions. These improvements in air quality yield significant health benefits, including reductions in very low birth weight and very premature births, as well as fewer asthma-related emergency department visits among children ages 0 to 5. This is true even when potentially offsetting increases in pollution from the electricity generation needed to power EVs are accounted for.  The benefits are higher in the high-pollution counties with Alternative Fuel Corridors, where baseline exposures are greatest. The resulting reductions in very low birth weight births alone could generate annual benefits of $1.2 to $4.0 billion. These findings underscore the dual environmental and public health benefits of EV adoption.

Poisoned Fruits: The Legacy of Arsenic Pesticides in the Early Twentieth-Century United States [Link]

This paper provides the first systematic evidence on the health consequences of arsenic-based pesticides, the dominant insecticides in U.S. agriculture until World War II. I digitize county vital statistics for rural areas from the early twentieth century and link them to historical measures of pesticide use. Arsenical spraying in the 1920s and 1930s increased rural infant mortality by about 2 percent per standard deviation of exposure. Linking Army enlistment records to census manuscripts, I show that exposed cohorts were shorter on average. Groundwater data reveal lasting contamination, underscoring the persistent health costs of early chemical revolution.

Published and Accepted Papers  

The Great Migration and Educational Opportunity (with Eric Chyn and Bryan A. Stuart)

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. July 2024 [Link]

This paper studies the impact of the Great Migration on children. We use the complete count 1940 Census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooling (12 percent) by moving from the South to North. Many counties that had the strongest positive impacts on children during the 1940s offer relatively poor opportunities for Black youth today. Opportunities for Black children were greater in places with more schooling investment, stronger labor market opportunities for Black adults, more social capital, and less crime.