Heinz College Researchers Provide a Historical Perspective on Air Pollution and Health

Air pollution has significant and long-lasting harmful effects on human health. But the primary focus of research on air pollution in the United States since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 has been the health implications of particulate matter, with little study of air pollution and health in historical periods. In a new article in NBER’s The Reporter, two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy provide new evidence on historical air pollution and health in the United States.

Karen Clay is a professor of economics and public policy, and Edson Severnini is an associate professor of economics and public policy at Heinz College.

“Research on historical air pollution can provide new evidence on the health consequences of air pollution in the United States and offer insights that may be relevant for policymaking in settings with high levels of air pollution, such as developing countries,” explains Clay. Clay also holds courtesy appointments at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and the Department of Energy and Public Policy, is a senior fellow at the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon, and is a research associate with NBER.

Clay’s and Severnini’s research has focused on four topics related to historical air pollution and health, each of which they discuss in the NBER article:

1. The costs and benefits of expansion of coal-fired power generation as measured by infant mortality from 1938 to 1962,
   
   
2. The interaction between historical air pollution and influenza pandemics in 1918, 1957-58, and 1968-69,
   
   
3. The costs of the Clean Air Act for the electricity sector, and
   
   
4. The benefits to fertility from the declines in airborne lead pollution starting in 1978, when lead was added as a criteria pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

“One advantage of working on U.S. topics is that there are data spanning relatively long periods of time, including periods without and with regulation,” notes Severnini, who is also a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics in Germany and a research associate with NBER. “Because analyzing air pollution and other types of pollution in U.S. history is relatively new, there are many opportunities for additional research,” he said.

###

For more information, see “Clearing the Air: Historical Air Pollution and Health,” by Karen Clay and Edson Severnini, in The Reporter, No. 2, 2024, NBER.

About Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy
The Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy is home to two internationally recognized graduate-level institutions at Carnegie Mellon University: the School of Information Systems and Management and the School of Public Policy and Management. This unique colocation combined with its expertise in analytics set Heinz College apart in the areas of cybersecurity, health care, the future of work, smart cities, and arts & entertainment. In 2016, INFORMS named Heinz College the #1 academic program for Analytics Education. For more information, please visit www.heinz.cmu.edu.