Visiting Scholar: Claudia Persico
Summary
Claudia Persico visited the Stone Center for the autumn quarter of 2024 to work on several projects about how environmental pollution can cause inequality. Much of Persico’s research focuses on how early exposure to environmental pollution can cause inequality by affecting child and adult health, development, behavior, and academic achievement. In a recently revised working paper called, “Can Pollution Cause Poverty? The Effects of Pollution on Educational, Health and Economic Outcomes,” she showed how early exposure to pollution from local industrial sites affects long-run outcomes, such as wages, educational attainment, cognitive disability, and adult poverty.
Persico is writing a paper discussing whether recent COVID-era air purification upgrades in schools in North Carolina improved academic achievement. Air purification systems were predominantly installed during the pandemic to limit children’s exposure to COVID, but these same systems also reduce children’s exposure to air pollution, which has been shown to affect test scores. While it is known that pollution affects test scores, there is limited evidence on what can be done to improve outcomes for children. The paper is called, “The Cleaner the Air, the Better They Fare: The Effects of Air Filtration on Student Achievement” and is a collaboration with Thomas Snyder at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Sarah Fuller at the University of North Carolina. Using detailed data on all students in North Carolina public schools matched with data on air purification upgrades and Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding, Persico and co-authors estimate the effects of air purification upgrades in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic on student achievement. They find that installing air purification systems during the pandemic led to improvements in test scores, with mixed evidence on improvements in student absences.
Relevant Publication
- Persico, C. (2022). “Can Pollution Cause Poverty? The Effects of Pollution on Educational, Health and Economic Outcomes” (NBER Working Paper No. 30559). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w30559
- Persico, C., Snyder, T., & Fuller, S. (forthcoming). “The Cleaner the Air, the Better They Fare: The Effects of Air Filtration on Student Achievement.”
