Clean Air in the Classroom: Environmental Inputs and Human Capital Formation

Poor air quality has become endemic in many parts of the world due to its negative impact on health and cognitive abilities, with several developing countries shutting down their education and economic activities for weeks when air quality is bad. Early exposure to bad air quality is linked with serious health impacts that could limit one's potential, making young children particularly vulnerable. While improving outdoor air quality is costly and requires collective action from numerous stakeholders, improving indoor air pollution (IAP) may not only aid in mitigating some of the negative impacts of exposure to bad air quality but also serve as a relatively cheap and feasible policy alternative to shutting down education and economic activities. Our understanding of the efficacy of improving IAP is limited. To that end, the team is designing a randomized field experiment in public schools in and around Lahore -- one of the most polluted cities in Pakistan -- through which they provide randomly selected schools with air purifiers and monitors to investigate whether improved IAP impacts young children's health, cognitive, and non-cognitive outcomes and how those effects change in the short to medium run.