Essays on the Interactions Between Environmental Quality, Health Status, and Human Capital Formation

This thesis contains three essays on the interconnections between the environment, health and human capital formation. The essays are varied in their focus but are unified by a common goal of providing novel evidence on the interdependencies between natural environments and the societies they support. Chapter 1 motivates the broad research agenda and contextualises the work with respect to existing knowledge. Chapter 2 focuses on the possibility that regional variation in environmental quality experienced early in life can have lasting implications for health and well-being over long time horizons. Specifically, the chapter provides new evidence on the implications of early-life conditions for older adults in Ireland by revisiting a set of public health interventions first studied by Delaney et al. (2011, Journal of Health Economics, 30(1), 1-10). It employs detailed residential history information collected as part of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing to link participants' birth environment to a range of health and wellbeing outcomes in later life that were not previously studied in the context of the reforms. Early-life conditions are proxied by local infant mortality rates at birth. Such rates experienced a significant urban-rural convergence in the mid-1940s that was accelerated by the 1947 interventions. Contrary to previous research for the cohorts exposed to the suite of policies, the analysis reveals limited associations between local infant mortality at birth and any of the dimensions of health or wellbeing studied. Chapter 3 presents novel evidence of the impact of noise pollution generated at major airports across the United States on the academic performance of students who attend schools nearby. The analysis empirically tests the relationship between aircraft noise and local educational attainment by utilising data on average academic performance in standardised tests at the school district level. The chapter's empirical strategy leverages plausibly exogenous variation in noise generated at airports over time due to the introduction of precision technology-optimised aircraft approach procedures, which are hypothesised to have inadvertently increased noise levels below flight paths. Federal Aviation Administration data on the implementation of these procedures is used to characterise their staggered roll-out at airports across the US. The technological development facilitates an investigation of the impacts of noise pollution on local students in a generalised difference-in-differences framework, providing the means to isolate the effect of noise exposure from that of potentially confounding factors such as air pollution. The results suggest that students in school districts below the flight paths subject to these new procedures performed worse relative to those in districts with similar airport proximity but which remained unaffected by the new technology. Chapter 4 asks whether environmental media discourse can impact mental health. Specifically, the chapter examines the relationship between environment-related television news broadcasts and individual-level wellbeing in the UK. Relevant news content is identified using quantitative text analysis and recent advances in semi-supervised keyword-assisted topic modelling. The estimated prevalence of environment-related information is linked to a longitudinal household survey in which its associations with contemporaneously collected individual mental health measures can be tested. The empirical strategy relies on within-individual variation and is aided by continuously rolling data collection throughout the analysis period: 2014-2019. The results do not suggest empirical support for the hypothesis that environmental news adversely affects mental health. The analysis also reveals limited evidence that heterogeneity across socioeconomic groups masks an effect or that a potential impact is moderated by the overall sentiment of the relevant news broadcasts.