Smoke in School: The Impact of Bad Air Quality on the Academic Achievements of Students in South Korea

• 발행기관: 한국재정학회(구 한국재정·공공경제학회)
• 저자명: Seokjin Woo Jongho Hong Kyunghee Kim
• 간행물 정보: 『한국재정학회 학술대회 논문집』2019년도 추계학술대회 논문집, 1~19쪽, 전체 19쪽
• 주제분류: 경제경영 > 경제학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2019.10.25

영문 초록

In the last five years or so, air pollution and its negative impact on people’s health and productivity have become a serious national agenda in Korea. Among diverse air pollutants, the severity of particulate matter concentration is of utmost concern. The purpose of this study is to estimate the impact of air quality, measured by PM10, on the academic outcomes of students in South Korea. We utilized a unique data set of nationwide middle school exam results and PM concentration data collected in the nearest monitoring station to the corresponding school site. We addressed the potential endogeneity problem between unobservable characteristics and air quality. We employed a set of instrumental variables such as forest area, forest depth, and precipitation. We also estimated the fixed-effect models which consider the school, district, and time fixed effects. Our estimation results show that the students, who were exposed to bad air quality, tend to show poor academic performance. We also found that the adverse impact of PM10 was larger at the low tail of the academic distribution than the high tail of the distribution.

목차

1. Introduction

2. Outlines for data

3. Methodology

4. Estimation results

5. Conclusions