This paper studies the impact of air pollution spillover from China to South Korea. To isolate the effects of cross-border pollution spillover from that of locally generated pollution, we exploit within-South Korea and over-time variation in the incidence of Asian dust—a meteorological phenomenon exogenous to district–time cells in South Korea—together with temporal variations in China's air quality. We find that conditional on being exposed to Asian dust, increased pollution in China leads to increased mortality from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in South Korean districts, with the most vulnerable being the elderly and children under five.
The effect of inequality on economic growth and efficiency is often debated. Our study investigates a behavioral phenomenon through which inequality might have adverse effects on economic growth. In particular we investigate whether or not individuals exhibit a discouragement effect in the face of inequality that leads to lower work effort. If such an effect exists, it provides a mechanism for converting even idiosyncratic inequality into sustained inequality with adverse consequences for the individuals being affected by the inequality and the economy as a whole. We investigate this phenomenon using an economic experiment to allow us to cleanly vary the nature of inequality and to allow us to directly observe several characteristics of the workers. We find robust support for the existence of a discouragement effect lending credibility to the claims that such an effect would exist in external situations among workers confronted with disadvantageous inequality.
We exploit two unusual policy features of academic high schools in Seoul, South Korea-random assignment of pupils to high schools within districts and conversion of some existing single-sex schools to the coeducational (coed) type over time-to identify three distinct causal parameters: the between-school effect of attending a coed (versus a single-sex) school; the within-school effect of school-type conversion, conditional on (unobserved) school characteristics; and the effect of class-level exposure to mixed-gender (versus same-sex) peers. We find robust evidence that pupils in single-sex schools outperform their counterparts in coed schools, which could be due to singlesex peers in school and classroom, or unobservable school-level covariates. Focusing on switching schools, we find that the conversion of the pupil gender type from single-sex to coed leads to worse academic outcomes for both boys and girls, conditional on school fixed effects and time-varying observables. While for boys, the negative effect is largely driven by exposure to mixed-gender peers at school-level, it is class-level exposure to mixed-gender peers that explains this disadvantage for girls.
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