Who Bears the Cost of Air Pollution? How Pollution Shocks Widen Socio-Economic Gaps in Educational Achievement

Education plays a major role in shaping lifetime opportunities, yet the mechanisms through which environmental factors contribute to educational inequality remain poorly understood. While disadvantaged groups are often more exposed to pollution, less is known about whether they are also more vulnerable to its effects.

In this paper, Simon Briole and Camille Salesse focus on the effect of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), the pollutant responsible for the largest share of health and economic damages attributable to air pollution. Using administrative records for nearly five million French secondary-school students (2010–2017), combined with high-resolution PM2.5 pollution data and wind-direction-based quasi-experimental variation, they provide causal evidence that  short-term air pollution shocks can amplify educational inequalities.

KEY FINDINGS:

• Exam-day PM2.5 pollution reduces test scores for disadvantaged students but not for advantaged students. Exposure above the WHO threshold lowers scores by roughly 4–5% of a standard deviation in middle-school exams and 6–7% of a standard deviation in high-school exams.
• These effects are large relative to existing achievement gaps. Pollution-induced score losses correspond to about 9% of the socio-economic achievement gap in middle school and up to 25% in high school.
• Short-term pollution shocks widen educational inequality. Rather than affecting all students equally, pollution disproportionately harms those who are already socio-economically disadvantaged.
• The authors identify cognitive resilience as a key mechanism. They develop a novel individual-level measure of cognitive resilience, defined as the capacity to perform under high-stakes conditions, and show that lower-resilience students are more vulnerable to pollution shocks.
• Cognitive resilience is socially stratified. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to underperform in high-stakes exams relative to their continuous assessment grades, indicating lower average resilience.
• High-quality schools can mitigate pollution vulnerability. Low-resilience students attending high value-added schools are no longer significantly affected by pollution shocks, suggesting that educational environments can build resilience and reduce the unequal consequences of environmental exposures.

AUTHORS:

• Simon Briole, Center for Environmental Economics Montpellier, University of Montpellier, Paris School of Economics
• Camille Salesse, Center for Environmental Economics Montpellier, University of Montpellier