Estimating the Effect of School Indoor Air Quality on Academic Outcomes Introduction

4. Abstract: This paper examines the effect that indoor air quality has on academic outcomes. Understanding this relationship is important for two key reasons: first, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has consistently ranked indoor air pollution among the top five environmental health risks (EPA 1987); and second, almost 20% of U.S. schools, with more than eight million attending students, have reported having unsatisfactory indoor air quality (GAO 1995). While a number of studies have examined the effect of indoor environmental conditions in schools on students’ health, test performance, and absenteeism, many were poorly designed, lacked credibility, or obtained ambiguous results. This paper uses difference-in-difference estimation on a large sample of recently renovated schools in a U.S. school district. This robust estimation technique allows me to control for many of the confounding variables that may also affect academic outcomes. Preliminary results suggest that improved indoor air quality has a sizably positive and statistically significant effect on both attendance rates and academic performance.