Smoke in School: The Impact of Bad Air Quality on the Academic Achievements of Students in South Korea

In the last five years or so, air pollution and its negative impact on people’s health and productivity have become a serious national agenda in Korea. Among diverse air pollutants, the severity of particulate matter concentration is of utmost concern. The purpose of this study is to estimate the impact of air quality, measured by PM10, on the academic outcomes of students in South Korea. We utilized a unique data set of nationwide middle school exam results and PM concentration data collected in the nearest monitoring station to the corresponding school site. We addressed the potential endogeneity problem between unobservable characteristics and air quality. We employed a set of instrumental variables such as forest area, forest depth, and precipitation. We also estimated the fixed-effect models which consider the school, district, and time fixed effects. Our estimation results show that the students, who were exposed to bad air quality, tend to show poor academic performance. We also found that the adverse impact of PM10 was larger at the low tail of the academic distribution than the high tail of the distribution.