This article examines the geographical and social distribution of air pollution cocktails with French data at the neighborhood level over the period 2012-2021. Using daily concentration data for the four main regulated air pollutants, I create new indicators that capture simultaneous exposure to air pollutants and match them with income data to estimate environmental inequalities. The results show that large urban areas, especially their cores, accumulate a high number of days per year with air pollution levels above World Health Organization daily thresholds, and that a substantial share of these days involve multiple pollutants simultaneously (around 40% in the largest cores). Within Urban Attraction Areas, higher-income neighborhoods are less exposed (about 12 fewer polluted days per year and a lower share of multi-pollutant cocktail days) partly because they are less concentrated in polluted cores, whereas the Paris Urban Attraction Area displays a particular pattern in which both the poorest and the richest (top 5%) remain highly exposed, due to their location in the amenity-rich but polluted core where high housing prices coexist with social housing and an ageing, often substandard, housing stock.

This paper examines whether air pollution shocks contribute to the reproduction of educational inequality. We combine daily PM2.5 data with exhaustive administrative records covering 5 million secondary school students between 2010 and 2017 in France. Exploiting variation in pollution driven by wind direction, we estimate the causal effect of exam-day exposure on performance in two national high-stakes examinations. We document pronounced socio-economic heterogeneity:  while more advantaged students are unaffected, exposure to PM2.5above the WHO guideline reduces test scores by 4-7% of a standard deviation among disadvantaged students, representing 10-25% of the baseline achievement gap between the two groups. We further show that vulnerability to pollution is strongly predicted by a novel individual-level measure of performance under high-stakes conditions, capturing cognitive resilience distinct from accumulated knowledge and itself socially stratified. Our results imply that acute pollution shocks may reinforce long-term and intergenerational inequalities.

This paper estimates the causal effect of chronic exposure to industrial pollution during middle school on performance in the end-of-middle-school national examination (brevet) and on high-school track choice. We link administrative records for nearly 1.8 million French students from three cohorts (2010-2012) to the universe of industrial facilities reporting emissions of thirteen major pollutants and construct each school cohort's cumulative exposure over the four years of middle school. We identify its causal effect using a wind-based instrument that exploits within-school, cohort-to-cohort variation in realized wind direction. A one standard deviation (SD) increase in realized downwind exposure lowers brevet scores by 0.069 SD, reduces the brevet pass rate by 1.8 percentage points (pp), and decreases entry into the academic high-school track by 2.5 pp. The effects are driven primarily by emissions from metallurgy and energy plants, especially particulates (PM10), reactive gases, and neurotoxic metals, and are highly concentrated geographically and among disadvantaged students