Resumen de Social Inequalities Linked to the Effect of Pollution on Health
Many pollutants are declining throughout the industrialized world. However, exposure to air pollution, even at the levels commonly achieved nowadays in European countries, still leads to adverse health effects. In this context, there has been increasing global concern over the public health impacts attributed to environmental pollution.
We propose to investigate the causal effect of air pollution on infants' health, respiratory outcomes in France using several natural experiments and a unique dataset combining data on environmental quality, health and property prices. The objective of the thesis is to explore empirically the relations between socio-economic status, environmental exposures and health outcomes. We also went further in the analysis of social inequalities linked to environmental pollution by sheding light on their macroeconomic consequences.
First, we empirically measure the impact of pollution on health and productivity and look at how pollution can contribute to health inequalities. Second, we estimate the health externalities from oil production by exploiting the oil refinery strikes in France in October 2010. We exploit this temporal event to identify the infant health externalities at birth from oil production, comparing outcomes in areas close to the refineries before and after the strike vs. during the strike, using areas far from the refineries as a control group. Finally, we have been developing a third research project focusing on the link between respiratory outcomes, housing prices and pollution using the hedonic price method. we try to draw inferences about individuals' valuations of risk by combining estimates of the effect of air pollution on both property values and hospital respiratory admissions for respiratory causes in France.
