Smog in Our Brains: The Impact of Short-term and Long-term Exposures to Air Pollution on Cognitive Performance

Compared to the large body of literature on the negative health effects of air pollution, the effect on cognitive performance has been much less understood. By merging a nationally representative individual panel survey with local air quality data according to the time and place of interview in China, we study both the short-term and long-term effect of exposures to air pollution on word and math test scores. We find that in the long run, air pollution inhibits both word and math scores of survey subjects. In the short term, the negative effect shows up more evidently in word test. Men perform worse than women in both tests when exposed to the same dose of air pollution. Older cohorts are more vulnerable to bad air quality than younger cohorts when taking tests, suggesting that air pollution has a lasting effect on cognitive performance.