Stratifying Cities: The Effect of Outdoor Areas on Children's Well-Being
This study examines how the presence of outdoor areas such as parks and playgrounds affects children’s well-being and how this effect is moderated by families’ socioeconomic status. Specifically, I aim to answer two research questions. First, does the presence of outdoor areas in children’s neighborhoods affect their well-being? Second, is there a differential effect depending on children’s socioeconomic status? The main part of the study uses data from the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being. The results suggest that the presence of outdoor areas in children’s neighborhoods has a positive effect on their well-being. In addition, the estimated effect of outdoor areas is larger for children from families with low socioeconomic status. Finally, findings from the Growing Up in Ireland data set suggest that children’s mental problems are a plausible mechanism through which outdoor areas affect children’s well-being. These findings have meaningful policy implications. Efforts to provide access to appropriate outdoor areas may be more likely to benefit disadvantaged children and thus reduce inequality in children’s well-being.
Presented at: ECSR Annual Conference 2023, RC28 Paris 2023.
The Stratified Effect of Extreme Temperatures on Birth Outcomes: The Role of Energy Prices
This paper fills a notable gap in the existing literature by examining how energy prices moderate the effects of extreme temperatures during pregnancy on birth outcomes. It uses a sharp increase in energy prices that occurred in Spain in March 2021 as identification strategy and incorporates a new weather dataset that increases the number of monitors from which weather data is derived in previous research by more than six-fold. The results show that the negative effects of extreme temperatures on birth weight are amplified at higher energy prices, especially for mothers of lower socioeconomic status. By focusing on how energy prices moderate the impact of extreme temperatures on birth outcomes, opportunities arise for policy interventions aimed at reducing health inequalities at birth. Moreover, given the critical role that events in utero play in individuals' later development, such policies have the potential not only to reduce health inequalities at birth, but also to address broader inequalities in long-term outcomes.
Presented at: PAA Annual Meeting 2024.
Air Pollution and Children’s Cognitive Effort: School-Based Evidence from Madrid and Berlin
With Jonas Radl.
The study investigates which factors explain the relationship between air pollution and children's test scores. Specifically, we focus on two factors: their cognitive ability and their cognitive effort. Based on data from an experiment with 1,368 fifth-grade students in Madrid and Berlin, the study aims to answer two main questions: Whether air pollution negatively affects children's cognitive ability and effort, and whether socioeconomic status moderates these relationships. We hypothesize that air pollution reduces both cognitive ability and cognitive effort and that children with low socioeconomic status may be more susceptible to these effects because children from high SES families may have mechanisms to compensate for the air pollution they are exposed to at school. By combining data on children with air pollution data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service and weather data from the E-OBS dataset, the study employs multilevel linear mixed models to examine how cumulative air pollution affects cognitive ability and effort across different pollutants and time spans of cumulative pollution. The results show significant effects of cumulative air pollution on both cognitive ability and effort, with the strongest effect observed for cumulative O3 exposure two months prior to the experiment. In addition, the results suggest that cumulative air pollution may have a greater impact on the effort of children of highly educated parents. No differences by socioeconomic status are found for cognitive ability.
Draft available soon.
Presented at: Effort and Social Inequality ECSR Thematic Conference 2023.
Maria Rubio-Cabañez