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Every Breath You Take—Every Dollar You’ll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970

Journal of Political Economy 2017 125(3), 848-902 open access
This paper examines the long-term impacts of in-utero and early childhood exposure to ambient air pollution on adult labor market outcomes. We take advantage of a new administrative data set that is uniquely suited for addressing this question because it combines information on individuals ’ quarterly earnings together with their counties and dates of birth. We use the sharp changes in ambient air pollution concentrations driven by the implementation of the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments as a source of identifying variation, and we compare cohorts born in counties that experienced large changes in total suspended particulate (TSP) exposure to cohorts born in counties that had minimal or no changes. We find a significant relationship between TSP exposure in the year of birth and adult labor market outcomes. A 10 unit decrease in TSP in the year of birth is associated with a 1 percent increase in annual earnings for workers aged 29-31. Most, but not all, of this effect is driven by an increase in labor force participation. In present value, the gains from being born into a county affected by the 1970 Clean Air Act amount to about $4,300 in lifetime income for the 1.5 million individuals born into

A day late and a dollar short: Liquidity and household formation among student borrowers

Journal of Financial Economics 2021 142(3), 1301-1323 open access
The federal government encourages human capital investment through lending and grant programs, but resources from these programs may also finance non-education activities for liquidity-constrained students. To explore this possibility, we use administrative data for federal student borrowers linked to tax records and a sharp discontinuity generated by the timing of a student's 24th birthday, which induces a jump in federal support. We estimate a corresponding increase in homeownership, with larger effects among those most financially constrained, and find supplemental evidence of lagged marriage and fertility effects. Analysis of earnings, savings, and heterogeneity favors liquidity over human capital in explaining the results.