• Corpus ID: 251554728

The effect of ambient air pollution on birth outcomes in Norway

@inproceedings{Ling2022TheEO,
  title={The effect of ambient air pollution on birth outcomes in Norway},
  author={Xiao Chun Ling},
  year={2022}
}

• X. Ling
• Published 12 August 2022
• Environmental Science

Ambient air pollution is hazardous to fetus even in countries with relatively low pollution level. In this paper, I examine the effects of ambient air pollution on birth outcomes in Norway. I find that conditional the same sub-postcode and calendar month fixed effects, prenatal exposure to ambient nitric oxide in the last trimester causes significant birth-weight and birth-length losses, whereas other ambient air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide appear to be at a safe level for the fetuses. Besides, newborns with disadvantaged parents are more affected by ambient nitric oxide. Both average concentration and occasional high concentration events of nitric oxide affect the birth outcome adversely. The contribution of my work includes: First, I find an adverse effect of prenatal exposure to ambient nitric oxide on birth outcomes, which fills a long-standing knowledge gap. Second, by virtue of the large sample size and the sub-postcode geographic division in Norway, I can control for a rich set of spatial-temporal fixed effects in order to overcome much of the endogeneity problem caused by the selection for living area and delivery date. Furthermore, I study the ambient air pollution problem in an environment with low-level pollution, which provides new evidence on the health effects of low-level ambient air pollution. pollution in the third trimester on birth outcomes such as birth weight and length and makes an attempt to fill the knowledge gap regarding ambient NO , which is not well studied in the literature. With a rich set of spatial-temporal fixed effects controlled for, my paper uses the temporal variations in ambient air pollutant concentrations within small geographical areas in Norway and narrow time intervals to identify how prenatal exposure to air pollution affects the birth outcomes of the infants. My data contains extensive information about parents as well as meteorological conditions that can be used to control for potential confounders. Since parents can select where to live and when to give birth, prenatal exposure to is endogenous. Rich data and an empirical strategy that uses variation of pollutants within small geographical cells and small time intervals constrain the possibility that estimated effects are biased due to this selection problem. in small grunnkrets . The population of the most populated grunnkrets in my sample increased from 3,455 in 1999 to 6,052 in 2016, while the average population per grunnkrets only increased from 444 to 549 during the same time period. This indicates that the population growth is uneven among grunnkrets . As a result of natural growth and migration, Norwegian population becomes more concentrated gradually.