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There is extensive evidence linking air pollution exposure to physical health. Less is known about the mental health impacts of poor air quality, especially in developing countries. We use data from India and estimate the causal impact of air pollution exposure on feeling sad, experiencing cognitive difficulties, and feeling unable to control and cope with important things in life. We instrument for air pollution exposure using the annual number of nighttime thermal inversions and show that air pollution exposure in the previous calendar year significantly worsens mental health in the current year. We examine potential mechanisms and find that air pollution exposure negatively impacts self-reported physical health, worsens respiratory conditions, and increases the likelihood of experiencing sleeping difficulties. Accounting for mental health impacts of pollution exposure is critical to accurately estimating the true health costs of air pollution and designing optimal environmental policy.

This paper examines the effect of Brazil's Family Health Program (Programa Saude da Familia, FHP) on cognitive skills of fifth-grade students. We use biennial data from national exams between 2007 and 2015, and variation in the FHP implementation date across municipalities, birth cohort, and test year to identify the effect of the program on language and mathematics test scores. We find that, in northern municipalities, students exposed to FHP at or prior to birth have 0.88 points higher language and 1.30 points higher mathematics test scores compared to those exposed to FHP in childhood. The estimated effects are intent-to-treat effects and correspond to increases of 0.021sd and 0.030sd in language and mathematics test scores. We use an event-study analysis demonstrating that the largest effects of FHP on cognitive skills are for those students exposed at or prior to birth, with trivial effects if exposed after birth. We do not find evidence for changes in parental investment behavior or child school attendance, which suggests that the effects are likely due to the direct impact of the program on child cognitive development.

Little is known about the effect of poverty alleviation programmes on mental health. In this paper we use variation in district implementation dates and location of residence to examine the short-run effect of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India on psychological wellbeing. We find that in the first year of the programme, women in recipient districts were less likely to experience depression symptoms. The effects of the programme on men’s mental health, on the other hand, are generally not statistically significant and are not robust to different specifications. We provide suggestive evidence that one mechanism through which the programme could have affected women, at least in the short-run, was providing them with greater economic security and independence.

Education has long been known as “human capital”, the capital involved in producing higher wages and augmenting labor productivity. It has also been associated with better nonmarket outcomes, including better health, lower crime and higher social cohesion. The high private and social benefits of education have motivated extensive research on determinants of schooling choices and skills. My dissertation uses data from a developing country, Indonesia, and studies the role of parents in children’s education during primary and secondary school in late 1990s, around the period of the East Asian Financial Crisis. I study two main questions in order to understand the implications of the crisis for children. First, I examine whether only children with low expected returns from education selected out of schooling during the crisis. I find significant negative effects of school dropout soon after the crisis on mathematics test scores, suggesting that the crisis induced some parents to pull children out of school even though they had the potential to do well. This analysis shows the importance of short-run constraints for school enrollments in Indonesia. Second, I explore how parents allocate education resources between their children at the intensive margin. I find that, on average, parental education spending is not a function of children’s test scores. However, parents are more sensitive to the human capital of younger female children and penalize them for having lower scores compared to their older siblings of either gender. Thus, girls appear to be more vulnerable to resource constraints as parents reduce investments and likely provide them with worse quality of education. Schooling in Indonesia is associated with high labor market returns. Thus, my research shows that much can be gained by insuring children against short-run shocks that have long-run consequences. As an extension, I also examine whether the crisis had short-run labor market effects as well. I test whether males living in urban areas were less willing to take risks when making occupation choices soon after the crisis. The results of this analysis, however, are ambiguous. Better data should allow answering this question more conclusively in the future.